Eduardo Pelegrín Martínez de Pisón, better known as Calpurnius and father of the most surreal cowboy and gunslinger in Spanish comics, the good old Cuttlas, He passed away this Thursday at the age of 63. “We knew he was sick, but his tireless enthusiasm gave us hope, and the faith and illusion with which he immersed himself in the new project that we had undertaken together, the edition of ‘The Book of Tao’, by Lao Tzu,” he lamented. in a statement the publisher Blackie Books, for whom he had illustrated the ‘Odyssey’ and the ‘Iliad’.
The artist from Zaragoza, a true renaissance comic strip, considers himself, not necessarily in this order, “a cartoonist for comics and graphic press, illustrator, scriptwriter and director of cartoons, amateur noisemaker and video jockey”. An incomprehensible curriculum that led him to work in the daily press, sign album covers, work in animated films or make posters like the one for the Salon the Comic of Zaragoza, one of his last commissions. In the hall, which starts this Friday, his posters will fly at half mast.
One of the cartoons of ‘El bueno de Cuttlas’
Born in Zaragoza in 1959, Calpurnio Pisón he trained in the Infographics section of ‘El Heraldo de Aragón’, went through newspapers such as ‘El País’ and ’20 minutos’ and shouted ¡eureka! when he created Cuttlas. It was 1983, and the pages of ‘The Jap’, subterranean fanzine, saw the birth of a minimalist cowboy who also chained acid reflections on the state of things that gave way to endearing secondary characters such as his friend Jim, his girlfriend Mabel, the Martian 37 or the immobile Juan Bala.
It is soon said that they passed through there, from Indians with feathers and bows to the types of Kraftwerk, definitive proof of the freedom with which Calpurnio faced this parody of the western that, little by little, became free verse of humor and comics. . “What has allowed me to get here is that, in his apparent simplicity, is his ability to transform,” reflected the cartoonist in 2010, when Glénat launched an anthology with the adventures of Cuttlas.
In fact, the artist himself explained on some occasion that that puppet with a hat was born as a scribble on a school desk, but it was the pages of ‘Makoki’ and ‘El Víbora’ that made it an emblem of the comic strip at the end of the last century. This is how they remember him in Blackie Books: «We knew him for his Cuttlas, the comic strip he published for years: seduced by the incredible expressiveness of his stick figures —that’s what he called them—, we suggested that he dare to illustrate the ‘Odyssey’. After some hesitation, he told us yes. But what we thought would be a ‘light’ job, a simple graphic comment, became one of the great projects of his life ».
Author of albums as crazy as ‘Mundo plasma’ and awarded in 2016 with the Aragonese Comic Award, Calpurnio killed Cuttlas a couple of times and revived him as many times. “I am not the first who, fed up with her creation, decides to kill her, but then I regretted it and resurrected her,” he ironized. Of course: last October, the cartoonist announced his intention to say goodbye once and for all to his omnipresent puppet. “I was getting more and more lazy to do the comics, and I hope I stopped before passing that laziness on to the reader,” he said then.
In fact, Calpurnio had already stopped publishing the Cuttlas strips in ‘Valencia Plaza’ almost a year earlier, although, naturally discreet, he didn’t say anything. «One fine day I decided that I was fine. I don’t have much interest in dying with my boots on,” he explained to ‘elDiario.es’ after casting off with Cuttlas.