Hasta siempre, Comandante. Since we mentioned in our Kennedy post that Mercocomic had serials about other historical figures, we decided we’d go ahead and share these Spanish Che covers from 1978. The complete run was three issues in the order seen, and the art is once again from the excellent Prieto Muriana, who even worked in a Pietà on cover three. “Hasta siempre, Comandante,” by the way, is a very famous Carlos Puebla song recorded by everyone from Joan Baez to Nathalie Cardone.
Mercocomic re-imagines one of the darkest periods in American history.
A long while back we shared a Spanish cover of the Mercocomic publication Kennedy and mentioned that a series of six appeared in 1977. The same comics were also published in French, so today, inappropriately, we’re sharing those six covers from France with their excellent if unsettling art by Prieto Muriana. Mercocomic published serials of other well known figures, among them Che, Hitler, Mussolini, Don Juan Tenorio Garcia, and Quijote 78. None are strictly factual accounts, but rather re-imaginings of the circumstances and motivations that drove important historical episodes. Kennedy, as you can probably guess from JFK’s exit on cover one and Lee Harvey Oswald’s dispatching on cover two, deals with events leading all the way up to RFK’s assassination, with the proceedings generously sprinkled with the sex, drugs, betrayal, and hyperviolence you’d expect in an adult comic. Years ago when we first ran across Kennedy you could download all six. Not anymore. But they’re still available for purchase online at reasonable prices and then friends can question your taste for buying them. Luckily that isn’t a problem for us—most everything we own is tasteless.
Drinking over the limit. Above, exceedingly rare Mexican cover art for a pulp-style comic book about the mass suicide/mass murder of more than 900 people at the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project of Rev. Jim Jones in Jonestown, Guyana. That event, from which the current U.S. English phrase “drank the Kool-Aid” is derived (though group members actually drank Flavor Aid), occurred today in 1978.
Who can’t walk and chew gum at the same time now, smartass? Above, another cool comic book cover, this one featuring a woman dressed vaguely like a ballet dancer seeming to scratch her ankle and shoot her enemy at the same time. Or maybe that’s just a normal French shooting pose, because they do everything with a bit more style. Actually, this is the French version of the Italian comic Satanik, created by Max Bunker and Magnus, and the character is Marny Bannister, a woman who develops a formula to make her beautiful, but with the side effect of turning her into a murderous criminal. The screen version starred Magda Konopka, who needs no formula of any sort to look good.
Where she stops nobody knows. Where we stayed in Paris near the famed Sorbonne seemingly dozens of comic book shops had sprouted. Here’s an amazing cover that caught our eye—Dans les spirales du temps, from Elvifrance, number 103 in its Serie Verte, 1973. See more Elvifrance here, here, here, and here.
It’s gonna be the death of you. The interest in Mexican pulp art continues to pick up steam. This heroin themed piece was created for a book or comic called Rock Candentes y Mortal, which translates as something like “red-hot and deadly rock.” It was painted, quite skillfully we think, by Jaime S., or alternatively Jaimes. The artists who worked in this market typically signed their work with single names, with the result that today info on most of them is impossible to find. At least for now. Let that be a lesson to you to always sign your work properly. This coming from a couple of anonymous website guys.
First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the woman. Today we’re back to Mexican pulp art with a piece from an artist who has signed his work R. Rojas Ordonez, someone we’ve never heard of before. A bit of text on the back of the painting suggests that the skull is somehow controlling the action here, maybe causing one of the characters to act while under a trance. Mexican art has used skulls as a major motif since at least the time of the Aztecs, and it has since been explored by everyone from Diego Rivera to contemporary graffiti artists, so we particularly like how this painting fits into that tradition. As we mentioned back in July when we shared five pieces from Dinorin, this style of art blossomed in the 1970s as covers for Mexican comic books, which makes it post-pulp rather than pure pulp. But the feel is certainly right, and collectors are responding, snapping up examples like this for hundreds of dollars. We’ll share a few more of these later.
Collectors discover treasure south of the border. Mexican pulp art is something to which collectors have been paying increased attention in recent years. However, it isn’t really pulp art in the traditional sense because it post-dates the era. That said, the pieces are very interesting. These were all painted by Dagoberto Dinorin (note his signature on three of the pieces) and he's gotten so popular that some works of his sell for five-hundred dollars or more. We have five for your enjoyment, and we’ll have more from this genre later.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1927—Mae West Sentenced to Jail
American actress and playwright Mae West is sentenced to ten days in jail for obscenity for the content of her play Sex. The trial occurred even though the play had run for a year and had been seen by 325,000 people. However West's considerable popularity, already based on her risque image, only increased due to the controversy. 1971—Manson Sentenced to Death
In the U.S, cult leader Charles Manson is sentenced to death for inciting the murders of Sharon Tate and several other people. Three accomplices, who had actually done the killing, were also sentenced to death, but the state of California abolished capital punishment in 1972 and neither they nor Manson were ever actually executed. 1923—Yankee Stadium Opens
In New York City, Yankee Stadium, home of Major League Baseball's New York Yankees, opens with the Yankees beating their eternal rivals the Boston Red Sox 4 to 1. The stadium, which is nicknamed The House that Ruth Built, sees the Yankees become the most successful franchise in baseball history. It is eventually replaced by a new Yankee Stadium and closes in September 2008. 1961—Bay of Pigs Invasion Is Launched
A group of CIA financed and trained Cuban refugees lands at the Bay of Pigs in southern Cuba with the aim of ousting Fidel Castro. However, the invasion fails badly and the result is embarrassment for U.S. president John F. Kennedy and a major boost in popularity for Fidel Castro, and also has the effect of pushing him toward the Soviet Union for protection.
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