Alfonso López (Lleida, 1950) is an author who has been dedicated to comics for decades, although not always with the recognition he deserves. His was the initiative to found the magazine Butifarra! in full transition, and his signature was common in headers such as El Papus or El Jueves. In his maturity, and without monthly magazines to publish in, López is in top form and has produced interesting works, both in collaboration with the screenwriter Pepe Gálvez, in Miguel Nunez. a thousand more lives —National Comic Award of Catalonia in 2011—, as a solo artist, en Black market and tram (2007) o the solar (2016), comics in which he explores the recent history of Spain through its iconic cartoon characters.
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Always faithful to his political commitment and left-wing militancy, López has just published, by the hand of La Cúpula, An afternoon with Himmler, which completes an unofficial trilogy around Bruguera’s characters. The author confesses that he has not responded to a predetermined plan, since the ideas occur to him from “impulses”. “An anniversary of a certain character, an event or a historical moment in which I find it relevant to immerse myself and which will necessarily need a common thread for its narration”, explains the cartoonist in an interview with this newspaper.
The work, which humorously reconstructs a visit by the Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler to Barcelona recently taken over by fascism, based on two different issues: “On the one hand, the feeling that I still had a pending account with my debt to those authors and their characters who contributed to my having a happy childhood and on the other, that I am passionate about history, especially the most contemporary one, and a One day a series of photographs of Barcelona from the immediate post-war period fell into my hands, in the most pro-Nazi period, where the city was decked out with swastikas. And that is a subject that we have not retained in our memory.
To carry out this work, López once again uses emulators of some of the most famous characters in Spanish humorous comics, taking advantage of “their enormous popularity, based on the charisma that their initial creators were able to give them, which makes them referents of a time and a country”, comments the author. “At least among certain generations of readers, because I have my doubts about whether the youngest, and with some exception, know who we are talking about. Although, in practice, that does not affect the narrative. In fact, recognizing certain characters is still an added value ”, he indicates. However, for López, the work is not a mere exercise in nostalgia: “It would be a mistake to try to clone those stories as they were 70 years ago. The challenge consists in not betraying the essence of the character and his time, but broadening his historical perspective based on the new current editorial possibilities and freedom of expression”.
In An afternoon with Himmler some of the most famous characters of Manuel Vázquez are very present. In particular, two sisters who live together and who are directly inspired by Las hermanas Gilda. “I consider Vázquez, along with Escobar, one of Bruguera’s most brilliant authors, especially in the period of maximum spontaneity that for me goes from the mid-40s to well into the 50s, although Vázquez would continue to show us signs of genius. ”, says Lopez.
But in addition to Bruguera’s reference, the absurd humor of classic cinema is very present in the comic: in fact, some emulators of the Marx brothers will walk through the streets of a Barcelona beautifully recreated by López. “The humor of the work responds to the personality of the protagonists and to the real events themselves, since the human condition is very much theirs”, clarifies the author. “It is also related to my personal tastes, with those forms of expression with which I feel more identified and have more fun, my references,” continues López, who has made intelligent use of word games, nonsense and charades. in his work that also drinks, as the author acknowledges, the humor of Chumy Chúmez or Fontanarrosa, “but above all the humor of Marx or Woody Allen, without forgetting Monty Python, the narrative of Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, the Coen brothers… Graphically, the author affirms that he does not feel close to the Bruguera school. “I am closer to the Franco-Belgian schools or to the American ones like the magazine Mad or to authors like Hirschfeld”, he explains.
Humor has been an effective weapon of political criticism, as Alfonso López knows well, who has been a cartoonist in media such as Avui, La Vanguardia or Público. “Humor can bring freedom, freshness and political incorrectness. But times are bad when we see that, in order to avoid the parrot’s chocolate and problems with the current laws, many media outlets are removing cartoons of political criticism from their content. Obviously, there are exceptions, ”he comments.
At a time when the most shameless historical revisionism surrounding the coup d’état and the Civil War is rampant in the public arena, a work like An afternoon with Himmler can be used to counter it. “Revisionism regarding the world events of fascism does not surprise me at all, given the sad role, and I am very pious, that the Spanish institutional left has played with respect to historical memory, and at a European level there would also be much to talk about,” he reflects. Lopez.
To finish, we asked the author what comics can contribute to the task of combating fascist discourse: “Its function is the same as what literature or cinema can do. The question is whether we are going to get there on time.”