MAKING PROGRESS

I worked for the Kerman Publisher CONDOR VERLAG for nearly two years. Why I quit working for them is something I’ll tell in the future. During those two years, the most positive experience was the chance to evolve and improve my art; to understand the inner mechanisms that make a story work and catch the reader’s attention. To grow as an artist or writer while getting paid for it is a chance everyone with merits worthy enough of this media should enjoy but, in the end, very few have.
I’ve managed to find all the covers I made for CONDOR VERLAG. You can see the evolution in my art at first glance. From cover 120 (posted earlier) to cover 150 one can see the art becoming more elastic, free, the construction being still deficient but allowing to move the characters in a more natural way. Usually one would work according to parameters coming from the publisher or the license owner. One can’t always make whatever one would want so the final product, in concept, always comes limited by invisible barriers that try to make the product something “main stream”. This formula, while being very valid, in occasions may represent a real nightmare and even work against the product itself, turning it into something without personality or coherence. There’s some kind of censorship that prevents the artist and script writer from working in a comfortable and creative way and giving the 100% of their talent and, therefore, preventing them from bringing anything new to the product but an endless number of pages to fill soulless magazines. A good evidence of this can be found in the stories published on the DISNEY magazines. Many of the artists working on those magazines are really incredibly gifted artists but the scripts are boring and, consequently, the end result is poor.
Ah, the covers…!

FIRST STORY

Searching through the hundreds of Tom & Jerry stories i draw, i just found the first one, for CONDOR VERLAG (1987). I hope you don’t get too mad with your criticism; it’s obvious those pages show my insecurity and short knowledge of the genre at that time. I had little control of the drawing, the characters and the scene set up, but still I managed to produce stories like this one. I took HARVEY EISENBERG’s and other author’s works whose names I still don’t know (yes, I’m ashamed, I know), and somehow I managed to shape the script I poorly designed days before. Probably due to that insecurity I decided, ha ha, to work in a gigantic page format. It is known that is harder to work in a big format than in a smaller page. It’s harder to compose the scene and have a general overview of the page development. Still, I started to work in a ridiculous 60x42 cm format. How foolish! :D. Every half page was a DIN A3 on landscape layout. Completely unnecessary and unjustified, but hey, that was it. One of my main obsessions was to be faithful and closer as possible to the Cartoon spirit, especially to the wonderful shortcuts produced by FRED QUIMBY in the forties and the fifties. A slam or two per page was meant to guarantee a good rhythm in the stories… or so I thought, and so I did.
Revisiting these works take me to at least two painful conclusions:
1 – Twenty three years later, my drawings are still as bad.
2- My god! Time flies!

THE BIGINNING

It was Autumn 1986 when i got noticed the german publisher CONDOR VERLAG had accepted me as writer and artist for their Tom and Jerry comics. Many years and many experiences have passed since that day.
In this new blog I wanted to show things that have to do with that part of my life, from the moment I started to live with this mythic characters. I’ll try to do it chronologically, but the memories of twenty three years of work and more than five thousand pages drawn are harder to organize than I’d like to.
Everything started with an ad on the news where they asked for comic artists. The ad was published by one of the many artists agencies that, in that moment, worked in Barcelona and produced tons of content for magazines around Europe, exploiting and abusing artists and illustrators for their own benefit. That’s something that hasn’t changed.
Therefore, I started to work through an agent and being exploited, earning a laughable sum for each page and having to renounce to my author rights.
Among the thousands of pages in a pile in my basement, lies the first page I draw for CONDOR VERLAG test request… one day I’ll find it! Meanwhile, I can post the first work I did for that publisher: COVERS. Covers are a very important element in every publication. Sometimes a good cover means the difference of a comic being bought or not. You can never let a rookie handle that job! (Like they did with me). That’s proof enough that editors, in general, can’t distinguish a good draw from a bad one.
For order’s sake, I guess I should start from the beginning.