Marina Sepúlveda
08/02/2021 16:00
Clarín.com
Culture
Updated 08/02/2021 16:00
Graphic humor is traversed by an unmistakable, voracious and dramatic reality that is transmuted from the cartoons and becomes bearable, and perhaps that is why Ricardo "Liniers" Siri draws with his laugh from his
Macanudo
strip
-of which has just been publish volume number 15, which closes the collection-, the covers of
The New Yorker
, his latest graphic novel
Wild Flowers
and even his podcast
Life is Incredible
, which he shares with Chilean artist Alberto Montt.
Liniers (Buenos Aires, 1973) is a
cartoonist, illustrator, painter and editor
, and one of the most internationally known references of Argentine comic strips.
In 2018 he won two important awards in the field: the Eisner award -considered the "Oscar" of the comics industry, for his children's book
Good night, Planet
a- and the Inkpot Award.
Liniers moved, including family, almost five years ago to Vermont, United States, invited by The Center for Cartoon Studies to teach
classes on Latin American comics,
to which he later added the possibility of also working at the prestigious Dartmouth University.
In his work, he installs the
suspension of time as a resource that interrogates
, responds and synthesizes knowledge, with the particularity of play and fun, one of its characteristics, which is evident in his words, his expressive voice and the humorous finishes that awaken smiles
The cartoonist installs the suspension of time as a resource that interrogates, responds and synthesizes knowledge, with the particularity of play and fun- / Photo: EFE
Getting to the job of cartoonist was "a chain of little good news," says Liniers in an interview with the Télam agency and adds: "like a little step that could climb higher, and that I could not believe that I had climbed it. Since I took my The first fanzine was a huge happiness and then I started publishing in magazines, on Página12, in La Nación and that was incredible. " Each of these instances "pushed him to look for the next one, and there appeared the possibility of publishing in The New Yorker", and other opportunities.
His own trajectory surpassed "fantasy",
Liniers
notes
.
"I would have been happy to publish in La Nación and get books out of Ediciones De La Flor, which was the publishing house that published my first books, where Quino, Fontanarrosa, Maitena and Caloi published ... all my heroes were there."
The rest "is like the strawberry of the dessert" and indicates that if I drew it in a cartoon "it would be a lot of strawberries and a very small dessert".
The cartoonist says that he sits down in the morning,
eats a couple of chocolate cookies
, draws the rectangle on the paper and looks at it for a while, to see what comes up.
"What
Macanudo
has
is that if one character isn't helping me, I look for another. If Enriqueta doesn't tell me anything that day, I'll put the mysterious man in black, and if he doesn't tell me anything, well, it's logical, because he's mysterious (he smiles ) ... but
having many characters I can jump from one to another
until something appears, "he says.
Having taken as a reference the difficulties of others "who at some point felt they had nowhere to go", such as Quino with
Mafalda
or Bill Watterson with Calvin & Hobbes (which tells the adventures of a boy and his stuffed tiger), Liniers relates that when he put together
Macanudo
he thought about it so as not to have that "end of the road".
The artist is based in Vermont, but knows New York City well, which served as the inspiration for one of the latest covers of The New Yorker.
In a previous edition, I had drawn people from different cultures united by a passion for reading.
"So, the more open I was in content, characters, design, type of humor, I felt that I was going to have more places to move forward. This is how it arises. I don't know if I have a trigger," he explains when asked, "but always a good trigger. It is 'a man is walking, and then you see what happens' (laughs) ".
Regarding his strip
Macanudo
, which was born in 2002, he clarifies that he is not closing the story with number 15 - which was recently published by the Penguin Random House label - but rather the collection of books in that format, in addition to the fact that November 15 is his birthday "so I was always fond of that number," he confesses.
"I want to give books a new look and
find another way to publish them, other formats,
other sizes, another design," he says.
Cap boy.
The cover edition of the March 22, 2021 edition, by Argentine Liniers.
"
Macanudo
for a while longer continues because I continue to have fun doing it. I use Enriqueta, Fellini, the goblins, as my little avatars. They are like splintered pieces of my personality.
I ask the characters questions and they respond,
" he says.
The relationship with his characters is a way of explaining things or asking questions, without trying to explain life to anyone.
He says: "One is kind of fond of the characters, and it is strange, because they are fictions, they are lies that I tell myself and the readers, they do not exist -he says-. Mafalda does not exist, Snoopy does not exist. They are little lies that In order for them to work, they have to have something real inside. They have to have a kind of pseudo-soul that works, otherwise the character is half squashed on paper. If you get that pseudo-soul to work, people think that Mafalda exists, that Snoopy It exists, and when looking at Enriqueta they sometimes forget the author for a little while, and that's what I try to do. "
During the quarantine due to the pandemic, continuing with the work was not a problem for Liniers, who speaks in the plural about the cartoonists, "because we were already locked up before, drawing," he says.
"(The comics) are little lies that I tell myself and the readers, but for them to work they have to have something true."
Ricardo Siri "Liniers" Cartoonist
"In that sense it was not very terrible and if I wanted to go out, I would come out in the characters. It was a whole year of drawing a lot of characters walking through the forest. Also because I felt that the reader was inviting me to walk, that they were all locked in different cities of the world: let them go out at least reading the comic, reading Enriqueta, Olga and Martincito walking through the forest. It was a time of a lot of scene outside, a lot of trees in 'Macanudo' during the pandemic ", he explains.
What is it like to create from a different country than the one you trained in?
"
Your head stays
in Argentina
. One can never leave Argentina at all. Macanudo was never a manners or conjunctural cartoon, so it is not tied to Argentina beyond my deepest Argentinity. But
I am not portraying what happens to us. the Argentines but what happens to me as a human being
. I think that is why comics appear in countries that have nothing to do with ours and people identify themselves ".
Liniers was born in Buenos Aires in 1973. He is a cartoonist, illustrator, painter and editor and the author of the successful strip Macanudo.
He won awards.
What he likes the most is traveling, moving to "expand the world."
Liniers likes to travel, move and "expand the world", a possibility he had with the opportunity to move to Vermont, where he lives with his family "in the middle of the forest" with the option that his daughters have a different childhood to his - which was in the city - "such a natural childhood", from where "nature sneaks in" into his drawings.
In fact "the last three years is the green period of '
Macanudo
', because the trees from being very simplified became more real and appear" small streams and rivers and lagoons and animals and things "with which it crosses when it goes out to take a walk ", he relates.
With a work published in many countries, Liniers disagrees with the idea that tragedy is something universal and comedy the opposite, because otherwise "Les Luthiers, Quino, Charles Chaplin and the Simpsons, each one would remain in his own little need", ponder.
Liniers.
celebrates after having received "La Catrina 2019", in 2019. / Photo: AFP
"The subject of
comedy has more to do with failure than success
. Nobody wants to see the comedy of the captain of the soccer team who succeeds with women. We want to see the comedy of the loser, the 'beautiful loser' as he said. Leonard Cohen. The loser can sometimes be similar to Chaplin, Woody Allen or Chavo del 8, and we all fail on this planet in the same way. No matter where we are. We all fail out of love, financially or skating on the street the same in all countries, "he remarks.
In his travels through Latin America with the musician Kevin Johansen and the artist Alberto Montt, the cartoonist can experience "the beauty of traveling and knowing many countries", which is to see that "we are much more similar than what they try to say to us", and although the popcorn has different names - goat, canchita, popcorn - "in everything else we all fail with the same elegance," he says.
In his reflection on the current situation of the comic strip in Argentina and Latin America, he considers that it is one of its best moments "because for some time here we were given absolute freedom to do what we want", something that contrasts with the history of the activity, where the line was to make adventures, jokes, while the other arts (literature, theater and cinema) "could do what they wanted."
In addition to this freedom, "women also joined the world of comics and the business stopped looking like a men's club."
"It is a moment that I find fascinating. I have never seen such a different variety of comics and cartoonists, such a gigantic range, and each one works towards their own side, almost without influences," he reflects.
According to Liniers, currently the difficulty in publishing comics and making a living from the activity is considered a negative thing, while it is in favor "that the cartoonists do not try to adapt their aesthetics to a publishing house."
As an ongoing project, he has that of a graphic novel "
the longest he has done so far
", with a script by his wife, Angélica Erhart, "a story between classic and modern", which he estimates will be out in March of next year.
Telam
GOES
Look also
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“I will remember for you”: the book that Juan Forn finished two days before he died comes out