The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Henry Jenkins’ Confessions of an Aca Fan site has a long feature mostly taken from an essay by one of his Media Theory students, Luis E Blackaller, discussing the portrayal of eroticism in the comics of Mexico (to which I should add “MATURE READERS”), relating the comics and the artwork to socio-cultural influences in Mexican life and from outwith the country, from social problems to soap operas and even Star Wars and how many traditional Mexican comics were swept away when the market was opened up more to US popular culture in the 80s. Very interesting reading in a subject area that I really don’t know much about.

(cover to clearly Star Wars-influenced Starman, the libertarian from 1978)

No medium exists in a vacuum, of course, and Mexican comics are no exception, drawing on the country’s history (both pre-Spanish arrival and afterwards), politics and culture as well as numerous outside influences. From Luis’ introduction to his essay: “In Mexico, comicbooks and visual storytelling have had a life of their own. They have degenerated since the times of Posada, el Chango García Cabral and many others to what they are now, a particular mixture of Mexican soap opera melodrama with softcore porn and pulp fiction. I want to explain how that happened through my experience as one that read his first comicbook when he could not still read words.”

(Cover to Kaliman, the Incredible Man, which, as Luis points out, may well have been stealing shamelessly from Marvel, but the plot of a local hero overwhelmed by characters from an outside pantheon also has parallels with what happened to many Mexican comics)