2023-10-21 06:51:13
“If you are a little sick in the head, that is, if you have a neurotic point, comics are bad business,” he says. Santiago Valenzuela, author of ‘The Adventures of Captain Torrezno’, the most ambitious and longest-running saga of recent Spanish comics, which has begun to be republished by Astierri since its first volume. “More than twenty years have passed and, when I now see the hands in that first book, I think they are too amateurish, too amateurish. That’s why, for the new edition I think I must have redrawn thousands of hands. Now I am preparing the third and fourth but, luckily, these already hold up to the level and, graphically, are quite similar to the last ones. In any case, There are still many things I would change. For example all facesbut it’s impossible”.
In 2002, Santiago Valenzuela published ‘Distant Horizons’, the first volume of ‘The adventures of Captain Torrezno’, an epic whose origin was in a short story written by him. “I don’t consider myself a writer, but I decided to write that story about a guy who set up a kind of model in a basement in which he created a couple of miniature people. He left and, when he returned years later, he was amazed to see that they had evolved , that they had created cities and that there were even different armies fighting in a war of religion in which some carried an ID card as banners and others a credit card. In the end, God was frightened by his creation and his second coming ended the same as in the comic, with the explosion of his house due to a butane leak because, although he had played the Creator, he was a victim of fatality, since he could not control his own circumstances.
Convinced that the story could be adapted into a comic, Valenzuela began to develop the story and meet some of the characters who would play a prominent role in his work. “Suddenly, The character of God came across there, that mysterious drunk from the bars who performs some slightly subtle miracles. and finally there appeared Captain Torrezno, the typical foreign character who ends up in a world he doesn’t know and that it is so out of place, that it ends up having a comic effect.
From that moment on, Santiago Valenzuela found himself with two possibilities: opt for a traditional story about bars and drunks in Madrid or shape an epic with multiple levels of reading, references to scholarly culture and winks to popular culturewhich reviewed some of the most important events in human history.
“Instead of focusing on customs, I preferred to make that Marxist motto of ‘first as a tragedy and then as a farce’ a reality and play with history by mixing, as children do when they play with plastic soldiers, a Roman legion with German soldiers of the Second World War that, sometimes, are not even on the same scale. Although it may seem like an original proposal, it is not so much so because, in a country that does not have a comic industry and in which there are not so many people dedicated to In this regard, it is not so difficult to differentiate. On the other hand, despite the ambition that characterizes the work, there is a certain modesty throughout it. A modesty typical of genre literature that does not need to be a thesis work, not to mention something current, nor something that worries people and in which humor is important, because things done without humor have a slightly ridiculous point.
Everything is written
After more than two decades since the appearance of the first volume and with a National Comic Award behind their backs, The Adventures of Captain Torrezno They already have eleven volumes, the last of which, ‘Anamnesis’, just saw the light of day a few weeks ago using as a promotional claim: “This is how the Microworld began. How it will end, not even God knows.”
“Bueno, I do know how the story ends. In fact, everything has been very defined from the beginning. Before taking out ‘Distant Horizons’, I already had some notebooks lying around in which many of the things that came out later appeared, such as, for example, a kind of parody of the Death Star with a section view with flats, or ships, or flying balloons on top of a frying pan… It was a time when, although I was not systematically collecting things, I did think ‘this is going to appear in such and such an episode’, regardless of the fact that some of them were still very far away. Then I have been adding things that have more or less closed all the gaps and others that, at the same time, opened new lines,” says Valenzuela, who anticipates how ‘The Adventures of Captain Torrezno’ will continue in the future.
“With volume number twelve, which is the one I am working on now, the story of the basement on Valverde Street concludes, which represents a third of the total history. The second part would be the meeting of the microcosm and the macrocosm, which will be located in leafy rural Galicia and maritime Galicia, the two areas where the different groups of Lilliputians will settle. Subsequently, the differences between the macro and the micro disappear, giving way to a last part that will be in another time and in another galaxy. In between, My idea is that Captain Torrezno gains complexity, that he stops being so neutralthat he begins to realize that he is never going to return to his old life and that it thus acquires a more tragic touch.
Added to Santiago Valenzuela’s narrative ambition is the fact that The fantastic genre that he develops requires a very realistic drawing that, in his case, is made with traditional techniques, without resorting to the computer other than to label and give shadows.. “Many people tell me that switching to a digital tablet would save time, but that would mean that, from the beginning, the work process would take place in front of a screen and I am not convinced. Furthermore, although they assure me that any texture can be achieved, any brush, in the end you lose contact with the pencil, because the digital pencil is nothing more than a plastic tip on another plastic,” says Valenzuela who, it must be said, is not satisfied with routine graphic solutions to get out of the passed.
“If I have to draw people going up in an elevator over four pages, I can’t make all four pages the same. Each one will be different to amuse myself, to amuse the reader and because I believe that, as a professional, you also have have to have a certain deontology”, explains the author, aware of the enormous task that still lies ahead of him until he concludes ‘The adventures of Captain Torrezno’. “I think they are things that go with character. There are those who want to start something and finish it, and people who have that thing of delayed pleasure. I suppose that psychologically I am one of the latter because, although I like to finish a volume and have it come out, “I’m also looking into the distance. I think that’s partly a consequence of the type of comics I grew up with, the ‘to be continued…’ comics.”
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