The History of Mankind for Beginners
Ernesto Priego talks with Latin America's most beloved cartoonist.
Ernesto Priego -- Críticas, 4/1/2002
The 67-year-old cartoonist known simply as Rius wanted to change the world from his drawing board. In ultra-patriarchal Mexico he drew sexy cartoons with women enjoying equal power and pleasure in bed. In a meat-consuming culture he preached the virtues of vegetarianism. In the most devout of Catholic nations he spoke about the significance of atheism. And, at the height of the historic debate between capitalism and socialism, he simplified the teachings of the world's leading leftist prophets for the masses of Latin America. When the rest of the world caught on, Rius became a reluctant celebrity.
Eduardo del Río, aka Rius, is Mexico's foremost graphic narrator and one of the world's most famous cartoonists. He is the creator of a unique style that juxtaposes the techniques of collage, cut-and-paste montage, and comic-book cartooning. Rius's style uses humor as well as simple language and imagery in a way that makes complex issues easily understood by all. Even though his style has changed throughout the last 50 years, it's always recognizable. His pages combine profuse visual documentation, images borrowed--sometimes stolen--from different sources, big blocks of written text, and his own characteristic cartoons, which make editorial comments by using word balloons. Rius invented a new cartoon idiom by pictorially telling a story through monolog or dialog in which real characters and anonymous commentators interact to explain political concepts. Mexican comic books historian Armando Bartra says that Rius fits into a '60s pedagogical tradition called concientizadora (raising consciousness).
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In Mexico, where official education has traditionally been on the conservative side, Rius has been a highly influential teacher. In the United States, his cult favorite Marx para principiantes (Marx for Beginners, Errepar, 2001) was sold in supermarkets, groceries, and drug stores. Like an aging punk rocker, he is strongly political, outspoken, and irreverent. He's one of the few authors in Mexico aside from Carlos Fuentes who can pack any venue with an appearance. His teaching philosophy is popular-based; it is a very ideological kind of cultural studies.
"I like knowing that I have changed my readers' minds, that I have turned them into vegetarians, or that I have interested them in leftist politics," says Rius. "The greatest thing is learning my work is useful to others. It sounds Christian, but it is true." Raised and educated in a very strict Catholic environment, the renegade seminarian observes: "I have dedicated myself to religious criticism and opposing the majorities, the powers-that-be."
Rius has published more than 65 of his 100 titles with editorial giant Grijalbo (now Grijalbo Mondadori). These include a series of cleverly informative primers on almost every major topic: socialism, capitalism, religion, feminism, sex, death, AIDS, education, health, food, philosophy, literature, and art. His latest book, El católico preguntón (The Curious Catholic, reviewed in this issue), is explicitly critical of the Catholic church. One of the seven books he published in 1997, Filosofía para principiantes (Philosophy for Beginners, Grijalbo, 1997), has sold more than 33,000 copies in nine editions, placing Rius in seventh place on Grijalbo Mondadori's Top 10 Best-Sellers list, which also features Paulo Coelho, Donald Walsh, Stephen Covey, and the Dalai Lama. His total Gijalbo-Mondadori sales are approaching one million copies.
The Cartoon as a Weapon
In 1955, Rius was still working answering phones at a funeral parlor when he first published a cartoon in the now legendary magazine Ja-Já (Ha Ha). Rius's early influences included the humorous work of the Argentine Oscar Conti (Oski) and Abel Quesada's sequential art. He was also clearly inspired by New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg. His first "silent humor" illustrations lacked the originality and political tone he later acquired. In the following years his work was published in both major and independent journals, magazines, and newspapers. His career evolved from the simple, innocent visual joke to the cartoon essay; from the political cartoon to the social protest comic book. Beginning in 1965, his first comic book series, Mis Supermachos (My Supermachos), a critical commentary on Mexico's social problems, offered a gallery of opinionated inhabitants of a fictional town, San Garabato Cucuchán. His second comic series magazine, Los Agachados (The Bent Over), published from 1968 to 1981, attacked any imaginable political subject, and it is estimated that 20% of the material that was used in Rius's future books originally appeared in that magazine.
But Rius had his eye on bigger things than comic books and magazine strips. He began teaching socialism to a broad-based readership when he published his first book, Cuba para principiantes (Cuba for Beginners, Grijalbo, 1998), which described the island's revolutionary society, in 1965. The book was a precursor to a series of political primers that started in 1976, when he published Marx para principiantes. A string of books that covered Mao and Lenin, as well as biographies of Che Guevara and Trotsky, followed in a steady stream. The books were read widely and encouraged many to join workers' and students' associations all over the world.
Rius had always been an iconoclast. In 1968, he published several cartoons and comics criticizing Mexican president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz. His work put him in jail and almost had him executed. In 1994, he published Lástima de Cuba (It's a Shame About Cuba, Astran, 1996) and was met with the most criticism he's experienced yet. In it he paints a frightening, merciless portrait of Fidel Castro and expresses his total disappointment with Cuban reality. "The Cuban people and their supporters saw me as a renegade traitor," he says. "I had evolved, and I thought that my readers had gone through that same process."
Though he had once been a guest of honor on the island, the book shops in Havana were banned from selling his titles and he became a persona non grata. "I had documented my pessimism about the Castro regime," Rius continues. "I thought I had been cheated because the socialist propaganda had triumphed over reality." Those who disagreed called him a sell-out, but he insists that his politics have not changed: "I am still a leftist. I think now I am a nontraditional Marxist. The problems the left tried to solve are still the same. Capitalism has not solved them nor will it ever. One has to keep fighting against injustice, poverty, neo-liberalism, globalization."
Rius's earlier work hasn't been devalued by the failure of Communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall, although he has continued to react to the changing world. Rius finds it "very strange" that his books on socialism are still sold and accepted around the globe. "People might read them for nostalgia of things past," he suggests. "I was very radical in my first books. When I was in the Communist Party my view of things was tinged by the party's worldview. When I left the party I started to question all that, and my work changed. But many of my readers were still stuck on my earlier fundamentalist ideas, and didn't accept my critical work."
Different Times, Same Artist
It seems ironic that at first Rius did not want to be a cartoonist; he wanted to be more like Mexican graphic designer Vicente Rojo. Originally more interested in "serious" illustration, painting, and design, he was ultimately drawn to political cartooning by economic need and the lack of formal artistic education. As his countercultural ideas matured, his style reappropriated the French Situationist aesthetics of Xeroxing and mechanized reproduction. Rius is a master recycler, archivist, collector, artisan, and, in a way, pop aesthete. He constantly breaks every imaginable rule by sampling, copying, distorting, altering, and reconfiguring even the most sacred texts and images in a way that would scare even the most avant-garde "First World" free thinkers. "Nowadays I compose all the typography on the computer and gather or create all the images I need. I print the text, and I cut and paste manually," he says. Unlike his American imitator, Larry Gonick, Rius hasn't adopted the computer completely. "I don't like using the computer to design the page layout because it homogenizes everything. It is a globalizing format," he says.
In 1983, in his seminal comics history, La vida de cuadritos (Life in Comic Panels, Grijalbo, 1998), he called Mexican comics "the worst of the whole world." Rius saw in Mexican cartooning a continuation of advertising aesthetics. He said, "the bad quality and even worse taste of Mexican comics can be attributed to its editors and publishers, more interested in selling 'popular' products than in the didactic use of the comic book form." Nevertheless, he recognized the quality of the new '80s generation of cartoonists such as Helioflores, Magú, El Fisgón, and Ahumada, but criticized them because they were not reaching the masses as once he did. Still, he is certain that the Mexican cartoon is not dying. Today he feels inspired by U.S. cartoonist Matt Groening's work. "I think The Simpsons is the greatest novelty," Rius says. "I love its ferocious critique of everything."
Rius both reinvented Mexican cartooning and created a new way of reading and thinking about comic books. He is an innovator, and his long list of imitators and followers around the world is there to prove it. Under Tepoztlán's clear deep sky, Rius manages to be optimistic about his craft and the commitment necessary to keep it alive. "Sometimes one thinks the genre will disappear, but suddenly, somehow, cartooning renews itself. There are always crazy people willing to do anything, to take chances. That will never disappear."
Priego is a comic-art scholar, translator, critic, and curator. He is professor of literature and critical theory at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. His writings on comic and cartoon art have appeared in many Mexican and international journals.
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