Alberto Breccia

Alberto Breccia (Montevideo, April 15, 1919 - Buenos Aires, November 10, 1993) was a Uruguayan cartoonist who developed his entire career in Argentina. His most representative works were Sherlock Time, Ernie Pike, Mort Cinder, Life of Che Guevara and a readaptation of El Eternauta , all with scripts by Héctor Germán Oesterheld, as well as Perramus with a script by Juan Sasturain. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of Argentine comics and one of the quintessential icons of world comics. The extensive work of the artist also marks him as a benchmark for art linked to human rights and resistance to authoritarianism.

Biography

Childhood and youth

Born in Montevideo, at the age of three his family moved to Mataderos, a neighborhood in Buenos Aires. There, before dedicating himself to professional drawing, he worked as a worker in the meat industry: "He did a very unpleasant job, he was a gut scraper" .

However, he was beginning to take his work as a cartoonist seriously. As he himself recognized on some occasions he was not gifted: he was a guy with some ability . & # 34; When he finished the day at the slaughterhouse he would go to my house and draw what he could. With that babbling I started looking for a job."

In those years, 1937, 1938, newspapers imported material from North American and European unions, so you had to impress some editor to find a place in them. Alberto was persevering, and meanwhile, since 1938 he published in a neighborhood magazine, Acento, edited by his brothers and their friends. Over time, he got them interested in his work, even though it "paid very little; [but] that bit allowed me to quit the other job." The first comics by him were a silent comic strip called Mr. Pickles , which he never managed to sell, and one about a Chinese detective: Mu-fa , of which he sold ten strips.

Professional beginnings

At the beginning of the 40s, he began collaborating with illustrations and comic strips in the magazine Tit-Bits for the Láinez publishing house, adapting The Adventures of Rocambole. "Logically, a mess came out. They had to cut it because nothing was understood.& # 34; He worked for the publisher for more than a decade and it was there that he learned the first weapons of the trade, inspired by authors such as Burne Hogarth.

Breccia working on a drawing, using a living model to accurately represent the scene.

In 1946, he replaced cartoonist Augusto Cortinas as head of the series Vito Nervio, published by Dante Quinterno publishing house in the magazine Patoruzito. With scripts by Leonardo Wadel, he reached great expressive perfection, although a resounding Breccia would state that "of all that, nothing is salvageable". He also made the Western series "Firearms" for the European market.

His first major work was Sherlock Time, created at the end of the 50s with Héctor Germán Oesterheld. The evolution that can be seen from this work would be motivated in part by the rage provoked in him by the words that his friend Hugo Pratt blurted out at him one night: "You are a cheap whore, because you are doing shit when you could do something better& #34;.

Internationalization

In 1960 he began working for the British publisher Fleetway and considered the possibility of moving to Europe, although the illness of his first wife (who died shortly after) made him decide to stay in Argentina. In 1962 Oesterheld and Breccia created Mort Cinder, which was followed by Life of Che Guevara (1968) and a new version of El Eternauta (1969), which had originally been illustrated by Francisco Solano López in El Eternauta (1957). Analyzing his own work in 1970, Breccia would say that "before and after Mort Cinder, nothing". A contemporary author such as the Spanish Víctor de la Fuente considered, however, that his work on Che Guevara was exemplary, stating that

It demystifies the hero and analyzes the man. The hero is dispossessed of all his attributes, confronts the reader only with his image, and each reader qualifies him as a hero or villain. I believe that Breccia has accomplished a truly gigantic analysis work, with a grafism that scratches on abstraction, has made a man palpitate in his dialectical nakedness, overcoming all that has of myth this character.

Breccia next to his assistant Ballesteros, teaching him to solve a scene.

After making the Graphic History of Chile and part of the Graphic History of the Argentine Republic, he works for Italian magazines such as Il Mago, from Milan, the which edits The Cthulhu Mythos (1973), a collection of adaptations of different stories by H.P. Lovecraft made together with the screenwriter Norberto Buscaglia, which surprises with its less realistic and more expressionist style, which adapts perfectly to the tone of the original. After that, he did not abandon the field of terror or adaptations, either of Edgar Allan Poe's stories or a version-parody of the Dracula myth ( Dracula, Dacul, Vlad?, Bah... , 1984).

Last years

In 1974, El Viejo (as he was known in the world of comics), began a long-lasting collaboration with the screenwriter Carlos Trillo, with whom he produced works such as Un tal Daneri (1974), set in Slaughterhouses, which for Breccia meant "recovering my childhood and adolescence a bit". Together they would produce other works such as Nobody (1977), Buscavidas (1981) and short stories with an adult look based on traditional children's tales.

His most important work after Mort Cinder came from the hand of screenwriter Juan Sasturain. This is Perramus (1983). Halfway between adventures and absurd humor, this work ridicules and at the same time denounces the Argentine dictatorship, mixing fictional characters with other real ones (such as the writer Jorge Luis Borges, who, in an exercise of the purest history fiction , he is awarded the Nobel Prize, which he never really received) and he won the Amnesty Prize in 1989, in the category of best book in favor of human rights.

Of his latest works, it is worth mentioning Report on the Blind (1991), adaptation of one of the most chilling passages of Ernesto Sabato's novel On heroes and tombs, where Breccia masterfully captures the disturbing and sick atmosphere of the original text and achieves harrowing hallucinatory images.

A family saga

With his wife Nelida Garcia', Alberto Breccia had three children and all of them also became cartoonists: Patricia, Cristina and Enrique. This last one is the one that, in the end, would become the most outstanding, thanks, among many other merits, to his series Alvar Mayor, with Carlos Trillo, and to his collaboration with his father in Life of Che Guevara. Curiously, father and son made two adaptations of the life of Lope de Aguirre, practically at the same time, one for the European market and another for the Argentine market.

Style

When addressing the study of the different types of lines used in drawing comics, Enrique Lipszyc will say about his brush stroke

"Each stroke of Breccia is a creation; it plays with the colourful and texture of the line. It shows, obviously, a very personal technique."

Works

Mort Cinder

The Cthulhu Mythos

North South

REPORT ON THE BLIND

Versions

Heavy dreams

Wholegrain perramus

(among others)

Comics

Compilations

• Alberto Breccia Sketchbook, Ancares Editora (2003).
• Alberto Breccia. Complete works. Vol. I (includes Searches and Versionsthe latter with Sasturain script.
• Black Breccia (1978).
• Black Breccia. Version 2.0, Doedytores (2006).
• The Eternal and Other StoriesColihue in Argentina and New Comic in Spain.

Other activities

• Alberto Breccia took care of the special art design of the film "El Viaje" (1992), directed by the Argentinean filmmaker Pino Solanas.
• Alberto Breccia is not only a well-known comic master, but he was interested in all the plastic aspects. Made, for example, several acrylics that were used for the film The journeydirected by Pino Solanas in 1992. A year earlier he also produced illustrations for Martin Fierro by José Hernández, published in 2004 by Doedytores.

• His facet as a painter is little known by the great public and little abundant. As he himself explains: "The plastic interested me before the comic (...) All my life I have painted; but this facet is hidden, because I do not want to mix the hacienda. "

• As he experienced in drawing, in oil painting he worked both on canvas, as in board or with eschayola; for him the materials and sizes of the paintings were no problem. His pictorial, abstract, strongly impressionist, colourful and sad work at the same time, is permeated with the social sensitivity and misfortune of the human soul, who also knew how to translate into his great works as Perramus, Report on blind and so many others, being today very sought and quoted.

• His character Vito Nervio inspired the film Beto Nervio against the forces of evil (1978) by Miguel Bejo.

• In collaboration with his son Enrique, he made drawings in Chinese ink on historical events and Argentine proceres –Revolution of May, Manuel Belgrano, Declaration of Independence of Argentina, José de San Martín, Batalla de la Vuelta de Obligado, Cornelio Saavedra, among others – for the television series of illustrated stories Microhistory of the world, by Carlos Alberto Aguilar, issued between the 1980s and 1982 by ATC (Canal 7) during the commercial stops of the station. These illustrations in the form of comics would later be coloured with watercolors, by his daughter Patricia Breccia.

Tributes

Between January and August 2008, he participated posthumously, with originals provided by the Museum of Drawing and Illustration, in the exhibition tribute to the Argentine Cartoon, held at the National Image Center, Angouleme, France, at the initiative of José Munoz.

In May 2012, the exhibition Argentina 202, a show with history was inaugurated in the Annex Building of the Chamber of Senators of the Province of Buenos Aires, who defined it as a "work of art unique» that contributed to collective memory and the cultural industries. The collection La epopeya de Mayo was presented there, a series of canvases made from original prints by Alberto and his son Enrique Breccia on texts by journalist Carlos Alberto Aguilar about the Argentine revolution of 1810 for Microhistorias del mundo, a television program censored during the self-styled National Reorganization Process in 1981.