Solano López:
"I love drawing tons of things,
of all different kinds."
"I love drawing tons of things,
of all different kinds."
Article and interview by Osvaldo Aguirre (1998)
Paredón y después magazine, Mar del Plata, First semester of 1998, #9
Paredón y después magazine, Mar del Plata, First semester of 1998, #9
After having lived for over fifteen years in Europe and Brazil, Francisco Solano López returned to Argentina in 1996—specifically to Buenos Aires, the city where he was born in 1928, “my hometown and the place where I grew up,” as well as the setting of many of his comics, and especially of the masterpiece he was in charge of illustrating: The Eternaut, the world acclaimed chronicle of an extraterrestrial invasion written by Héctor Oesterheld.
During Solano Lopez´ prolonged exile, Buenos Aires remained always present in his mind—that is, in his drawings—as demonstrated by the that formidable saga Evaristo (scripted by Carlos Sampayo) or that other short-lived attempt Corrientes (scripted by Guillermo Saccomanno). “Now the city has changed a little. But walking through the neighborhoods, it’s still recognizable: the houses, the cobblestones, the trees... What’s missing is the traffic officer standing on every corner.” However, the pavilion in Plaza Sucre, in Belgrano—where Juan Salvo and the lathe operator Franco faced off against a Mano, commander of the invading forces in Buenos Aires—“remains exactly as I drew it to this day.”
SIX HUNDRED PANELS
His first steps as an illustrator date back to early his childhood. Among other memories, Solano López recalls with a smile that “I once drew a picture of my father; on of my aunts saw it and showed it to him that same night.” Movie outings with his father also fueled his imagination in those years and gave him material to draw “for days.” Later on, during his college sudent days, he would visit an established artist for the first time. “I went to see (José Luis) Salinas to show him my drawings. He told me I had potential, but that I had to pick a focus—it didn´t make sense for me to practice drawing and study law at the same time.” That full commitment became possible around 1953, after striking a deal with his mother: “I gave her an advance sum and told her that if I didn’t succeed at earning a living as a professional artist within a year, I’d quit.” By the end of that year, Solano López was already working for Editorial Abril, one of the leading publishers of the time.
But his professional work actually took off at Editorial Columba. “I started with a comic strip called Perico y Guillermina, published in El Tony magazine, with scripts by a well-known writer of the time (Roger Plá). It was a story about a boy and his bicycle. Later on I drew Uma Uma, a fantasy comic for Editorial Abril´s Rayo Rojo, an experience which would later enable me to take on Bull Rockett, which was at the time assigned to Paul Campani. They showed me the originals so I could study the style.” That first mission at Editorial Abril also marked the beginning of his collaboration with Héctor Oesterheld, the scriptwriter.
Solano´s partnership with Héctor Oesterheld continued with Bull Rockett (1955–1959), a comic blending elements of fantasy and science fiction, and reached its peak starting in 1957, when Oesterheld invited Solano to work on his own publications, Hora Cero and Frontera. That date marked a turning point for Argentine comics, which underwent a radical upwards shift in themes and literary value. Solano López played a key role in this shift—not only with The Eternaut (1957–1959), but also through other series created with Oesterheld, now forgotten after being overshadowed by that unforgettable tale of the extraterrestrial invasion of Buenos Aires.
Juan Salvo’s adventure was in some sense foreshadowed in Hora Cero with Rolo, el marciano adoptivo (1957), a story about the invasion of the “Pargas,” aliens disguised as humans who, curiously, disintegrate when punched. Another sci-fi series, Rul de la Luna (1958), appeared in Frontera Mensual. It featured “a boy kidnapped by Moon-dwellers, whose faces Oesterheld imagined as crescent-moon shaped. I drew the girl who accompanied the hero with a miniskirt—before they even existed—because I wanted her to look beautiful.” In Hora Cero Mensual, another great saga was published: Amapola Negra (1958), starring the crew of an American bomber in Nazi-occupied Europe. Its episodes, titled by mission number, emphasized above all the human substance of the characters who underwent every possible human emotion, which Solano López faithfully portrayed. Solano´s expressive drawing, which often highlights the widest range of expressions and gestures, became a hallmark of his style.
In addition to Spitfire (1958)—in which a group of children aid the French resistance against the Nazis—Solano returned to war themes in Ernie Pike, another series originally drawn by Hugo Pratt who later passed his torch to several other artist. Among the episodes illustrated by Solano were: “The Battle of the Duchess,” with remarkable underwater scenes, and “Dunkirk,” portraying the famous evacuation through the adventures of two teenagers.
Joe Zonda, copilot (1958), published in Frontera, featured elements of zany humor. The protagonist, a man from the provinces who has only recently arrived at the capital city, worked for an airline that “transported all kinds of things,” using a strange mix of skills—from aviation to accurate quotes from Confucius in the original language—all learned through correspondence courses. “We had a blast with Joe, which was wild and absurd. The best part was the villain, called Octopus, who—like in Batman—kept coming back. Joe would drop an atomic bomb on him, and the next episode, there Octopus was again, causing trouble.”
That amount of work for those strips demanded his full attention. “After finishing my last episode of Bull Rockett, I foucsed exclusively on Frontera´s comics, because we were always coming up with new ideas, and Héctor (Oesterheld) constantly suggested new things. And since I love drawing all kinds of stuff, I would always say yes to him. One day Julio Schiaffino and I did the math: we were drawing about 600 panels a month. Back then, we measured our production by panels, not by pages.”
The success of Frontera´s magazines allowed Oesterheld to offer the best salaries on the market. “They paid a third more than Abril. But they didn’t pay it in cash: in fact, the amount they actually paid you was the same that Abril offered, but they wrote down an extra as credit in a little notebook (laughs). That was supposedly the basis for future profit-sharing in a shared company that Oesterheld envisioned.”
THE CAMERA’S EYE
On September 4, 1957, in Hora Cero Semanal, the serialized publication of The Eternaut —Argentina’s comic masterpiece-- began. “Héctor would ask each of us, the artists that were working with him, what kind of comics we were interested in drawing. I asked him for a sci-fi series, but a realistic one—not like the one we had been doing, Rolo, which was too schematic, or Rul de la Luna, which was too removed from everyday life.”
From that wish and Oesterheld’s fascination with Robinson Crusoe and his rejection of the traditional hero model, the odyssey of Juan Salvo and his group of friends was born. Invaders from an unknown planet would unleash a deadly snowfall to conquer Earth through their slaves: the Manos, Gurbos and Cascarudos, as well as humans turned into robots. . A The few survivors—a group of ordinary men—had to organize a resistance.
In 1953, Rodolfo Walsh had already noted that “it is now accepted that Buenos Aires can be the setting for a detective adventure.” Oesterheld and Solano López turned that possibility into reality with The Eternaut. In Solano´s drawings, the city is not just a backdrop but plays a dramatic, active role. The documentary precision with which Solano depicts River Plate stadium, the subway at Plaza Italia, the streets and houses, the interior of a hardware store, collaborate with the eerie effect induced by the invasion—the loss and alienation of what was once familiar. “Solano López,” Oesterheld once said, “created an atmosphere that exceeded all expectations.” Another hallmark of this “atmosphere” would came at the end of each installment, usually in the form of a final a panel introducing something new—without text—or revealing a character’s reaction while omitting its actual cause. Besides the suspense it generated, what stood out was the expressive weight of the artwork and its narrative function.
“I was interested not just in facial expressions but also in body language, gestures, physical attitudes—all of which also supported the character’s personality and what they were doing or saying. I wanted the artwork to not be redundant but actively contribute, to suggest and complete a reality.” This narrative power is felt in the silent sequences (such as Polsky’s futile escape under the deadly snow, watched with anguish by his friends) and especially in the cinema-likle camera-eye movements that help scenes unfold.
Even though he recalls how, while drawing it, “family and friends would gather around my drawing board to find out what would happen to Juan Salvo,” and despite recognizing having put all his effort into those illustrations, Solano says: “The Eternaut was, for me, just one series among the many I was working on at the time.”
THE STUDENT AND THE COMMISSIONER
After The Eternaut came to its end in late 1959, Solano he began working for British publisher Fleetway, a partnership that lasted for fifteen years. “Everything was great (at Frontera), we loved the work, the comics were wonderful, and Héctor had unmatched talent and imagination as a scriptwriter. But those initial promises—of partnership, of author rights, international sales—never materialized. Years passed, no one said anything, and then we got a better offer.” In 1963, a wave of postal strikes triggered his decision to emigrate. “I was drawing pocket books on war themes, RAF stories, because I had sent in some airplane samples they liked. But I wanted to do a weekly comic. Their first script had arrived, and everything stalled because of a forty-day postal strike. They sent a duplicate, and two months later it happened again. I couldn’t take it anymore.”
He left Argentina and spent three years in Spain, and another year in Italy. When he returned, “I put together a team of five assistants, started sending Fleetway a hundred pages per month, and even got the agent to lower his commission: we were producing a lot, and we were all earning well.”
His second exile began in 1977, after the failed attempt to create the second part of The Eternaut, disrupted by Oesterheld’s political allegory and involvement—he had by then joined the Montoneros guerrilla movement, and was working from a hideout. He would later be kidnapped and ultimately murdered by the military. This was a sad and tough shock for Solano.
In spite of this, however, he started collaborating with writer Ricardo Barreiro on Slot Barr, a sci-fi series starring a space traveler. In this case, with no “real” reference points, “I had to invent everything, though maybe I unconsciously borrowed from several movies I’d seen and books I had read.” Still, the comic simulates a documentary, with pages from an “abridged Galactic Encyclopedia.” This was followed by the “paranoid fictions” Ministerio (published in Argentina in 1986), El Instituto (1989, with erotic touches), and El Televisor (1991), a delirious tale of adventures through exotic settings.
Solano López also carried with him an unfinished project about the War of the Triple Alliance. It was a lifelong dream, rooted partly in his family lineage. “I’m the great-grandson of Francisco Solano’s younger brother, who was the prefect of Asunción. When Solano withdrew to the north, the army took my ancestors prisoner, suspecting him of being a conspirator, and he died there. My great-grandmother stayed in the city with her children, and when Argentine troops arrived, she decided to come and settle in Buenos Aires. I was named after him because of my father’s admiration for his great-uncle.”
That project, later taken up with his son Gabriel, was only partially completed. “Since we couldn’t get any publishers interested, it ended up as a ten- or twelve-page standalone story. It was meant to be a kind of introduction to a much longer narrative about the entire war. When we realized it had no commercial appeal, Gabriel summarized the story, focusing on the contrast between the leader and an officer who witnessed his death. When Solano falls wounded from his horse, he tells his aides to flee and faces the Brazilian patrol alone. And whether this is fiction or reality, we had the officer witness the leader’s death from the bushes.”
Previously, he had adapted some of Gabriel’s short stories under the title Historias tristes, addressing “the existential dilemmas produced by political or social conflict, and the condition of exile.” But the most successful collaboration between father and son came with Ana (1983).
This comic, published in Europe, the United States (a beautiful edition by Fantagraphics Books, 1991), and partly in Argentina, is set in the near future, amid a war. The conflict initially serves as the backdrop to the anguished reflections of the protagonist, Ana, a university student still wrestling with old ideals. Though she believes history is “a string of absurd propositions,” she also thinks that “a single, isolated act of heroism” can change its course. Nevertheless, she too will succumb to her environment. After losing her freedom, trapped in an oppressive romantic relationship, Ana seeks her own death. Beyond the powerful artwork—harrowing in the final chapter, when vultures swarm over Paris—the story’s impact lies in its structure which weaves dreams, hallucinations, temporal jumps, and all sorts of scene cuts.
The other great series that Solano Lopez illustrated at the time was Evaristo, about the legendary commissioner Evaristo Meneses, who gained notoriety in the 1950s. “While chatting with Sampayo, we first thought of a noir-style comic, since that was his specialty. We tried some characters with an international feel so the story could work anywhere. Then we asked ourselves: why can’t he be an Argentine? We concluded that if the character is well developed and strong enough, it would be appealing to any audience regardless of nationality. We concluded that if the artwork and atmosphere were rendered convincingly , then the comic would reach readers´ sensitivities even if they don’t know where it takes place.”
So we came up with an Argentine commissioner, a bold move. ‘Why not Evaristo,’ Sampayo said. ‘Sure, Evaristo. Do you remember Evaristo Meneses?’” The comic—arguably the best in Argentine crime storytelling—recreates the urban landscape: streets and bars, trains and buses, the hotels at the Constitución train stations, with their usual dwellers (newsboys, sailors, prostitutes, ordinary men and women, etc.). The camera’s eye moves from the center to the neighborhoods (as in the episode “Gitanos”), and even into the provinces (as in that excellent story “The Blood of the Traveling Salesmen”), always meticulously sweeping every landscape . “I did it with enthusiasm because I loved the city, and since I wasn’t living in Buenos Aires at the time, it was a way to relive it, to feed my nostalgia. I drew it alone, with no assistants, and it took a lot of time.”
Crime comics, fantasy, science fiction, political and historical stories, adaptations of films and literature: Solano López has worked with every genre. In step with the times, he now ventures into erotic comics with Silly Symphony, “because I have fun with pretty girls, naked, doing daring things.” At the same time, he’s preparing to adapt several Roger Corman films for Roger Corman’s Cosmic Comics. Back in 1991, with a script by Jim Woodring, he illustrated for Fantagraphics Books a version of Freaks, Todd Browning’s circus nightmare. As if that weren’t enough, he’s also in talks with Juan Sasturain about continuing The Eternaut. “We’d need a story that somehow refers back to the first one, that reproduces its key elements and meanings—but from a contemporary perspective, remaining aware that the audience has both lost its innocence and gained in curiosity and sagacity.”
Solano López is the last great artist from the so-called Golden Age of Argentine comics that remains active today. His passion for drawing—which means constant reinvention and experimentation—remains as vigorous today as in his early beginning, when he still a young child who sketched the characters from movies. “What matters to me is that the story I´m working on is a good story. Perhaps other artists feel the same way: if the story lacks depth, then you don’t find it convincing. I certainly felt absorbed in the case of The Eternaut, Ana, or Evaristo. You enter into the comic, you live it, and you engage all your senses to extract the maximum from it visually, in order to be to tell the story by putting yourself inside it.”
During Solano Lopez´ prolonged exile, Buenos Aires remained always present in his mind—that is, in his drawings—as demonstrated by the that formidable saga Evaristo (scripted by Carlos Sampayo) or that other short-lived attempt Corrientes (scripted by Guillermo Saccomanno). “Now the city has changed a little. But walking through the neighborhoods, it’s still recognizable: the houses, the cobblestones, the trees... What’s missing is the traffic officer standing on every corner.” However, the pavilion in Plaza Sucre, in Belgrano—where Juan Salvo and the lathe operator Franco faced off against a Mano, commander of the invading forces in Buenos Aires—“remains exactly as I drew it to this day.”
SIX HUNDRED PANELS
His first steps as an illustrator date back to early his childhood. Among other memories, Solano López recalls with a smile that “I once drew a picture of my father; on of my aunts saw it and showed it to him that same night.” Movie outings with his father also fueled his imagination in those years and gave him material to draw “for days.” Later on, during his college sudent days, he would visit an established artist for the first time. “I went to see (José Luis) Salinas to show him my drawings. He told me I had potential, but that I had to pick a focus—it didn´t make sense for me to practice drawing and study law at the same time.” That full commitment became possible around 1953, after striking a deal with his mother: “I gave her an advance sum and told her that if I didn’t succeed at earning a living as a professional artist within a year, I’d quit.” By the end of that year, Solano López was already working for Editorial Abril, one of the leading publishers of the time.
But his professional work actually took off at Editorial Columba. “I started with a comic strip called Perico y Guillermina, published in El Tony magazine, with scripts by a well-known writer of the time (Roger Plá). It was a story about a boy and his bicycle. Later on I drew Uma Uma, a fantasy comic for Editorial Abril´s Rayo Rojo, an experience which would later enable me to take on Bull Rockett, which was at the time assigned to Paul Campani. They showed me the originals so I could study the style.” That first mission at Editorial Abril also marked the beginning of his collaboration with Héctor Oesterheld, the scriptwriter.
Solano´s partnership with Héctor Oesterheld continued with Bull Rockett (1955–1959), a comic blending elements of fantasy and science fiction, and reached its peak starting in 1957, when Oesterheld invited Solano to work on his own publications, Hora Cero and Frontera. That date marked a turning point for Argentine comics, which underwent a radical upwards shift in themes and literary value. Solano López played a key role in this shift—not only with The Eternaut (1957–1959), but also through other series created with Oesterheld, now forgotten after being overshadowed by that unforgettable tale of the extraterrestrial invasion of Buenos Aires.
Juan Salvo’s adventure was in some sense foreshadowed in Hora Cero with Rolo, el marciano adoptivo (1957), a story about the invasion of the “Pargas,” aliens disguised as humans who, curiously, disintegrate when punched. Another sci-fi series, Rul de la Luna (1958), appeared in Frontera Mensual. It featured “a boy kidnapped by Moon-dwellers, whose faces Oesterheld imagined as crescent-moon shaped. I drew the girl who accompanied the hero with a miniskirt—before they even existed—because I wanted her to look beautiful.” In Hora Cero Mensual, another great saga was published: Amapola Negra (1958), starring the crew of an American bomber in Nazi-occupied Europe. Its episodes, titled by mission number, emphasized above all the human substance of the characters who underwent every possible human emotion, which Solano López faithfully portrayed. Solano´s expressive drawing, which often highlights the widest range of expressions and gestures, became a hallmark of his style.
In addition to Spitfire (1958)—in which a group of children aid the French resistance against the Nazis—Solano returned to war themes in Ernie Pike, another series originally drawn by Hugo Pratt who later passed his torch to several other artist. Among the episodes illustrated by Solano were: “The Battle of the Duchess,” with remarkable underwater scenes, and “Dunkirk,” portraying the famous evacuation through the adventures of two teenagers.
Joe Zonda, copilot (1958), published in Frontera, featured elements of zany humor. The protagonist, a man from the provinces who has only recently arrived at the capital city, worked for an airline that “transported all kinds of things,” using a strange mix of skills—from aviation to accurate quotes from Confucius in the original language—all learned through correspondence courses. “We had a blast with Joe, which was wild and absurd. The best part was the villain, called Octopus, who—like in Batman—kept coming back. Joe would drop an atomic bomb on him, and the next episode, there Octopus was again, causing trouble.”
That amount of work for those strips demanded his full attention. “After finishing my last episode of Bull Rockett, I foucsed exclusively on Frontera´s comics, because we were always coming up with new ideas, and Héctor (Oesterheld) constantly suggested new things. And since I love drawing all kinds of stuff, I would always say yes to him. One day Julio Schiaffino and I did the math: we were drawing about 600 panels a month. Back then, we measured our production by panels, not by pages.”
The success of Frontera´s magazines allowed Oesterheld to offer the best salaries on the market. “They paid a third more than Abril. But they didn’t pay it in cash: in fact, the amount they actually paid you was the same that Abril offered, but they wrote down an extra as credit in a little notebook (laughs). That was supposedly the basis for future profit-sharing in a shared company that Oesterheld envisioned.”
THE CAMERA’S EYE
On September 4, 1957, in Hora Cero Semanal, the serialized publication of The Eternaut —Argentina’s comic masterpiece-- began. “Héctor would ask each of us, the artists that were working with him, what kind of comics we were interested in drawing. I asked him for a sci-fi series, but a realistic one—not like the one we had been doing, Rolo, which was too schematic, or Rul de la Luna, which was too removed from everyday life.”
From that wish and Oesterheld’s fascination with Robinson Crusoe and his rejection of the traditional hero model, the odyssey of Juan Salvo and his group of friends was born. Invaders from an unknown planet would unleash a deadly snowfall to conquer Earth through their slaves: the Manos, Gurbos and Cascarudos, as well as humans turned into robots. . A The few survivors—a group of ordinary men—had to organize a resistance.
In 1953, Rodolfo Walsh had already noted that “it is now accepted that Buenos Aires can be the setting for a detective adventure.” Oesterheld and Solano López turned that possibility into reality with The Eternaut. In Solano´s drawings, the city is not just a backdrop but plays a dramatic, active role. The documentary precision with which Solano depicts River Plate stadium, the subway at Plaza Italia, the streets and houses, the interior of a hardware store, collaborate with the eerie effect induced by the invasion—the loss and alienation of what was once familiar. “Solano López,” Oesterheld once said, “created an atmosphere that exceeded all expectations.” Another hallmark of this “atmosphere” would came at the end of each installment, usually in the form of a final a panel introducing something new—without text—or revealing a character’s reaction while omitting its actual cause. Besides the suspense it generated, what stood out was the expressive weight of the artwork and its narrative function.
“I was interested not just in facial expressions but also in body language, gestures, physical attitudes—all of which also supported the character’s personality and what they were doing or saying. I wanted the artwork to not be redundant but actively contribute, to suggest and complete a reality.” This narrative power is felt in the silent sequences (such as Polsky’s futile escape under the deadly snow, watched with anguish by his friends) and especially in the cinema-likle camera-eye movements that help scenes unfold.
Even though he recalls how, while drawing it, “family and friends would gather around my drawing board to find out what would happen to Juan Salvo,” and despite recognizing having put all his effort into those illustrations, Solano says: “The Eternaut was, for me, just one series among the many I was working on at the time.”
THE STUDENT AND THE COMMISSIONER
After The Eternaut came to its end in late 1959, Solano he began working for British publisher Fleetway, a partnership that lasted for fifteen years. “Everything was great (at Frontera), we loved the work, the comics were wonderful, and Héctor had unmatched talent and imagination as a scriptwriter. But those initial promises—of partnership, of author rights, international sales—never materialized. Years passed, no one said anything, and then we got a better offer.” In 1963, a wave of postal strikes triggered his decision to emigrate. “I was drawing pocket books on war themes, RAF stories, because I had sent in some airplane samples they liked. But I wanted to do a weekly comic. Their first script had arrived, and everything stalled because of a forty-day postal strike. They sent a duplicate, and two months later it happened again. I couldn’t take it anymore.”
He left Argentina and spent three years in Spain, and another year in Italy. When he returned, “I put together a team of five assistants, started sending Fleetway a hundred pages per month, and even got the agent to lower his commission: we were producing a lot, and we were all earning well.”
His second exile began in 1977, after the failed attempt to create the second part of The Eternaut, disrupted by Oesterheld’s political allegory and involvement—he had by then joined the Montoneros guerrilla movement, and was working from a hideout. He would later be kidnapped and ultimately murdered by the military. This was a sad and tough shock for Solano.
In spite of this, however, he started collaborating with writer Ricardo Barreiro on Slot Barr, a sci-fi series starring a space traveler. In this case, with no “real” reference points, “I had to invent everything, though maybe I unconsciously borrowed from several movies I’d seen and books I had read.” Still, the comic simulates a documentary, with pages from an “abridged Galactic Encyclopedia.” This was followed by the “paranoid fictions” Ministerio (published in Argentina in 1986), El Instituto (1989, with erotic touches), and El Televisor (1991), a delirious tale of adventures through exotic settings.
Solano López also carried with him an unfinished project about the War of the Triple Alliance. It was a lifelong dream, rooted partly in his family lineage. “I’m the great-grandson of Francisco Solano’s younger brother, who was the prefect of Asunción. When Solano withdrew to the north, the army took my ancestors prisoner, suspecting him of being a conspirator, and he died there. My great-grandmother stayed in the city with her children, and when Argentine troops arrived, she decided to come and settle in Buenos Aires. I was named after him because of my father’s admiration for his great-uncle.”
That project, later taken up with his son Gabriel, was only partially completed. “Since we couldn’t get any publishers interested, it ended up as a ten- or twelve-page standalone story. It was meant to be a kind of introduction to a much longer narrative about the entire war. When we realized it had no commercial appeal, Gabriel summarized the story, focusing on the contrast between the leader and an officer who witnessed his death. When Solano falls wounded from his horse, he tells his aides to flee and faces the Brazilian patrol alone. And whether this is fiction or reality, we had the officer witness the leader’s death from the bushes.”
Previously, he had adapted some of Gabriel’s short stories under the title Historias tristes, addressing “the existential dilemmas produced by political or social conflict, and the condition of exile.” But the most successful collaboration between father and son came with Ana (1983).
This comic, published in Europe, the United States (a beautiful edition by Fantagraphics Books, 1991), and partly in Argentina, is set in the near future, amid a war. The conflict initially serves as the backdrop to the anguished reflections of the protagonist, Ana, a university student still wrestling with old ideals. Though she believes history is “a string of absurd propositions,” she also thinks that “a single, isolated act of heroism” can change its course. Nevertheless, she too will succumb to her environment. After losing her freedom, trapped in an oppressive romantic relationship, Ana seeks her own death. Beyond the powerful artwork—harrowing in the final chapter, when vultures swarm over Paris—the story’s impact lies in its structure which weaves dreams, hallucinations, temporal jumps, and all sorts of scene cuts.
The other great series that Solano Lopez illustrated at the time was Evaristo, about the legendary commissioner Evaristo Meneses, who gained notoriety in the 1950s. “While chatting with Sampayo, we first thought of a noir-style comic, since that was his specialty. We tried some characters with an international feel so the story could work anywhere. Then we asked ourselves: why can’t he be an Argentine? We concluded that if the character is well developed and strong enough, it would be appealing to any audience regardless of nationality. We concluded that if the artwork and atmosphere were rendered convincingly , then the comic would reach readers´ sensitivities even if they don’t know where it takes place.”
So we came up with an Argentine commissioner, a bold move. ‘Why not Evaristo,’ Sampayo said. ‘Sure, Evaristo. Do you remember Evaristo Meneses?’” The comic—arguably the best in Argentine crime storytelling—recreates the urban landscape: streets and bars, trains and buses, the hotels at the Constitución train stations, with their usual dwellers (newsboys, sailors, prostitutes, ordinary men and women, etc.). The camera’s eye moves from the center to the neighborhoods (as in the episode “Gitanos”), and even into the provinces (as in that excellent story “The Blood of the Traveling Salesmen”), always meticulously sweeping every landscape . “I did it with enthusiasm because I loved the city, and since I wasn’t living in Buenos Aires at the time, it was a way to relive it, to feed my nostalgia. I drew it alone, with no assistants, and it took a lot of time.”
Crime comics, fantasy, science fiction, political and historical stories, adaptations of films and literature: Solano López has worked with every genre. In step with the times, he now ventures into erotic comics with Silly Symphony, “because I have fun with pretty girls, naked, doing daring things.” At the same time, he’s preparing to adapt several Roger Corman films for Roger Corman’s Cosmic Comics. Back in 1991, with a script by Jim Woodring, he illustrated for Fantagraphics Books a version of Freaks, Todd Browning’s circus nightmare. As if that weren’t enough, he’s also in talks with Juan Sasturain about continuing The Eternaut. “We’d need a story that somehow refers back to the first one, that reproduces its key elements and meanings—but from a contemporary perspective, remaining aware that the audience has both lost its innocence and gained in curiosity and sagacity.”
Solano López is the last great artist from the so-called Golden Age of Argentine comics that remains active today. His passion for drawing—which means constant reinvention and experimentation—remains as vigorous today as in his early beginning, when he still a young child who sketched the characters from movies. “What matters to me is that the story I´m working on is a good story. Perhaps other artists feel the same way: if the story lacks depth, then you don’t find it convincing. I certainly felt absorbed in the case of The Eternaut, Ana, or Evaristo. You enter into the comic, you live it, and you engage all your senses to extract the maximum from it visually, in order to be to tell the story by putting yourself inside it.”