Despite having a long artistic career, if the name of Tanino Liberatore (Quadri, Italy, 1953) is known in the world of comics, it is for his work as a cartoonist for RanXerox, also known as Ranx, the protagonist of a comic series created by Stefano Tamburini in 1978 and which lasted until the mid-nineties, and which today we can read in the comprehensive version published by La Cúpula. But he has also illustrated album covers such as Man from Utopia by Frank Zappa, he has drawn Batman, he has illustrated books by Apollinaire or Baudelaire and he has worked in the world of cinema, such as when he designed costumes for the film Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra – work for which he won a Cesar award. He has been at Comic Barcelona, ??where he has reunited with Ranx fans.
So many years of work and what everyone remembers most is one of his first jobs.
I love Ranx, and when I’ve illustrated poetry, for example, they come to talk to me about the comic, but it’s normal if you have a character that has worked so well and is still published.
It’s a comic full of violence and explicit sex…
It always surprises me that they talk about sex in Ranx, because the truth is that in all the albums there are maybe five pages, and it’s there because it had to be shown, but there are many more scenes of violence. They’ll probably think I’m sexually ill even if I draw a cup of coffee.
The story took place in a near future that fortunately we have not reached…
A few years ago there was a moment that I honestly didn’t like at all, I began to see how young people changed, as if they had lost the desire to dream. Despite the bad things of the time, we were dreamers then, and although unfortunately many things did not materialize, that led us to do different things to try to have a better world.
He was a pioneer in cyberpunk aesthetics!
It is others who have given me the label, my roots, both in drawing and culturally, are clearly in the Italian Renaissance, but it is true that the mix of elements in history took me there. I was a solitary cartoonist, and the people from the magazines Cannibale or Fridigaire introduced me to the North American underground of the time and I freed myself, it brought out everything bad that was in me, so when I started to draw Ranx I put everything I felt into it. , without any self-censorship.
Nobody closed the door on them.
A very important thing was that it was all our own production, because if we had gone to a publishing house, they would have told us no, that it was too violent and people were not used to it.
In fact, in some reissues they changed the age of Lubna’s character from 12 to 18 years old, to avoid problems…
In Ranx there is violence, drugs, sex, but not pedophilia, honestly, but the culture of the time was different, that is the difference. Not even the people in power who read it considered it, among other things because the girl was the toughest character in the story, she was the one in charge.
It is not cancelled.
Well, Apollinaire’s Eleven Thousand Cocks is also reissued! Ranx is nothing next to her. Today there is a rereading of the past, they even want to remove the statue of Columbus because he was a slave owner, it is an absolute absurdity, and for now Ranx has never been censored. We cannot read the comics of the past with today’s eyes.
You are not a revisionist.
No, not yet, but if it continues like this we’ll see, ha ha ha!
What are you most proud of?
I’m quite proud of Ranx, but I must confess that in general I’m not proud of my work, I always find some mistake that I hadn’t noticed, I always think I could have done it better. I have only ever been happy when a drawing turns out exactly the way you want, but it is very rare. I remember a big poster I made about climate change, on which I drew a monster, and I reached the peak of my technique with markers. What I am satisfied with is that I have always been honest and have given my best.
Catalan version, here
