An artist with a long career that has been changing styles, Max (Barcelona, ??1956) has just published Què (Finestres prize for comics in Catalan, in Spanish in Salamandra from April 13), which presents an antihero who undertakes a journey of personal construction, a genre that he parodies and that also gives him the opportunity to talk about the current world.
That?
Ah, to have the answer you have to read the book!
It’s the journey of an anti-hero…
It is a trip that seems long but in reality it is very short and you do not get to move much from the place. For many years I had in my head to write the typical story of the initiation journey but subverting it, thinking of ancient literature, myths or the Odyssey. It is a genre that has been seizing up, it has been codified a lot and now it is a very chewed template where you enter, change four elements and that’s it. He also wanted to subvert the fact that all these initiation journeys end well. The character goes through trials, grows, finds himself and reaches whatever goal.
Don Quixote and Tirant lo Blanc don’t end exactly well either.
No, but they are atypical examples. Even in real life, things sometimes work out and sometimes they don’t. Especially since self-help has taken over this narrative scheme, which seems to be able to is wanting. I was interested in dismantling that, but at the same time stressing that if you are annoyed, it is best to move, not stay still.
It is not explained what happens to the protagonist to make him leave…
Needless. Something sets him in motion, and in the opposite direction most people are going, which is one of the few clues given. The character is one of those who go his way and if he can, he moves away from what the majority does.
He wants to go to Trabzon thinking that it is a myth, but it exists and it is in Turkey…
I was blown away by finding Trapisonda in Don Quixote, and I immediately made the connection with Pulgarcito magazine, which published a comic by Ibáñez called La familia Trapisonda, and thus I picked up two references that have influenced my work. In the debate between high culture and low culture, I place Don Quixote and the Bruguera school at the same level.
He has an alter ego called Pilila…
I needed a Sancho Panza. When you travel alone, you inevitably end up talking to yourself. There were a lot of artistic possibilities, talking with your shadow, with your inner child or with your conscience, and I ended up with this character who is like a puppet. I named her Pilila because I think that men talk a lot with the pilila. It gave me a counterpoint: the character goes a lot to his own and is stubborn, and the other represents a kind of common sense, the voice of prudence, but very naive. And he is always right.
An influencer also appears, for which other colleagues use drawings.
The work of a comic author is usually solitary, and I really like to create bonds with the rest of my colleagues. The entire book is permeated with this critique, because everything is a mess. Reality has become so crazy that they make it difficult for us to make fiction. The book has taken on a tone of grotesque humor. I had the word slapstick in my head, a Spanish theatrical genre, and I found it very funny because the book is presented as a play: dialogued, with a fixed point for a theatrical spectator, the characters come and go… It’s a slapstick, with a loose and crazy humor. But it touches on hot topics today that worry me, like now with the influencer, with whom I have made a compendium of addiction to the virtual world as the maximum drug. We had heroin, cocaine, ecstasy… and now we have screens, which is almost the most dangerous drug of all. It may not destroy you physically, but it can destroy you. But I’m not a tech denier. Nor do I lecture anyone, I simply teach what is there.
A playwright horse comes out.
He criticizes that art is used to deliver speech, something very fashionable that I am quite against. The work is not born from the discourse, but the other way around, the discourse has to be born from the work. Sometimes I go to exhibitions where I see that the speeches are very lofty but the works are so little that you say: “It’s just that we’re not going anywhere like this.” The artist has to flee from solemnity. If one day I fall into it with what I do you can cut my hands directly.
There are also three witches.
You don’t know if what they are explaining to you is a ball or not and it throws the character off balance, very similar to what is happening today with the issue of gender and all that. The man is out of place, but so are the feminists, because things have appeared that were not expected. But no lessons.
Tribute to Edward Lear…
I have been a fan of his for many years, and the first to translate it into Spanish were Cristóbal Serra, the Majorcan writer, and Eduardo Jordà, who is a very close friend of mine. I also paid a lot of attention to his drawings, which are great. I wrote some poems in the form of him, which Jordán revised in Spanish and Laia MaLo in Catalan.
There is a very angry character…
It is the subject of internet haters. People want to get angry, and I don’t understand it too much, or maybe I do, because there really is something to be angry about, but at the same time they get angry about things that aren’t the ones that really make you angry. It’s a satire.
Has thinking about this comic in Catalan made you different?
The Finestres award is for comics in Catalan, so from the outset it forced me not to make a story without words, like my two previous books. I have returned to dialogue, and my mother tongue is Catalan, although I was educated in Spanish. In addition, I have lived in Mallorca for many years, and I always like to keep a record of the speech in the street, and the difficulty I encountered was whether I opted for the Catalan of Barcelona or that of Mallorca. I chose to mix them up a bit, which in the end is how I speak today. More or less when I’m in a place or another I change the chip, but things always escape me. But I have also had to make an effort, because almost all my life I have written in Spanish, except Lo piano vermell, about Pascal Comelade.
He is the first winner of the Finestres award. Do you see that the comic in Catalan really starts?
There are symptoms. The irruption of Finestres with the prize can do a lot, but there are also others like Males Herbes or Forn de Calç. There have always been institutional initiatives, but it is the private initiative that must take it forward and get readers. There are many Catalan-speaking comic book readers, but they are used to buying in Spanish because there was very little in Catalan. I trust that little by little a local scene will be created that can reach stability. It is essential that the reader can choose according to their tastes, that there be manga in Catalan and superheroes, and everything that is necessary.
Catalan version, here
