Cult cartoonist Alvarez Rabo - TBS Interview

Alvarez Rabo is more than an alter ego. He’s more than a modest cartoonist—actually he’s not really modest at all. He’s much more real than the tooth fairy and he’s worth much more than his persona as an attendant at the outdoor sports, hunting and fishing department of El Corte Inglés in Bilbao, where he wears the department store’s trademark Emilio Tucci suit. Away from the store, he wears a stocking over his face to maintain his anonymity and keep his job at the department store.

Until 2002, Rabo was known in leftwing comic circles as a savvy social commentator and militant feminist with a capacity for biting humour that only small, independent magazines were game enough to publish, though the Basque magazines TMEO and El Víbora published him right from the start. His first great success came with the album 'A las mujeres no les gusta follar', a feminist treatise created to dispel the unsupported but widespread myth that Rabo was machista, and which caused international scandal. Many other independent albums were published, never quietly (the latter was recalled and caused political scandal in Italy and Portugal). In his own words, Rabo’s “works reflected the political and sexual struggle of the left and the socio-historical developments in Spain”, when he was still creating them.

  Rabo committed “creative suicide” on September 11, 2002. A mere dominguero cartoonist, he gave it up because he didn’t make any money and major syndicated newspapers didn’t pick up his comics: at a glance they are overtly sexual, and mainstream publications wouldn’t risk the ramifications of publishing Rabo. The result of this decision the man says, is that “Alvarez Rabo yesterday was a rumor and today, after his ‘creative suicide’ in 2002, is legend like Lady Di, the Ché Guevara or Bruce Lee.

Aware of Rabo’s suicide, we were surprised to receive a letter from Mr Rabo in the October edition of TBS, so surprised that we travelled to Corte Inglés in Bilbao to meet the man and find out what motivated his letter to us and much more. He gracefully agreed to remove his face stocking and speak with us proving that he is indeed real.

TBS: You gave your fans the chance to prevent your suicide by writing you 1,000 letters, is that right?
Alvarez Rabo: Yes, they had to reach me before September 11, 2002 – anniversary of the coup d’etat in Chile organized by the Nobel Prize winner Henry Kissinger. And they had to be proper letters with stamps, not any of this email rubbish. Letters from women were counted as two because I support positive discrimination.

TBS: We decided to seek you out after receiving a letter from you in which you wrote us about the Spanish anthem having no words. Tell us what motivated you to write that letter.
Rabo: Because I think it’s better to have no anthem, better to have no flag; I liked the Buika song that says “my homeland is the centre of the earth”: I think it’s a valid stance. And I wrote you because it’s a magazine that only guiris are going to read because no one in Spain speaks English. In this Spanish democracy, Franco the dictator spoke more English than the presidents since democracy. The first, Adolfo Suarez, didn’t speak it; nor the second, Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo; nor the third Felipe González; not the fourth, that prick Aznar, not even Zapatero. None of them speak English correctly. When a French politician came to Spain, Zapatero said to him, “good time”, referring to the weather. I wouldn’t even say that, I would say, “good weather”. They should know English. Even to work in El Corte Inglés, they ask for English, but for the most important position in the country, no.             
    
TBS: How do your critics describe you?
Rabo: To be a comic critic you have to be a total idiot. They don’t understand Alvarez Rabo, they never did. Though one critic said something intelligent once, even though its rubbish cos it came from a comic critic. He said: “Alvarez Rabo dares to depict in his comics what most people don’t dare to think”. I respected that. It was talking about a comic I had done to fight against a reputation I had for being machista when I have always been a feminist. My objective was to rid myself of that reputation and also encourage women to buy comics because the female public never buys comics except for the odd Maitena or Mafalda. But this comic was a best seller, and the one that more women bought. ('A las mujeres no le gusta follar').

TBS: The first thing you notice about your comics is a racy, sexual theme, but once you read them it’s clear that you’re a feminist.
Rabo: Yes, I am a feminist. My wife gives me a lot of ideas and she is a feminist, and because I have very little character, I became a feminist. But I was never machista. I’m a feminist, I support positive discrimination, I support a woman winning in France for instance, or that the Clinton bitch win, or that—Esperranza Aguirre, no—la Teresa de la Vega.

TBS: How do you see the difference between men and women?
Rabo: In men, the blood descends to the middle area and that’s what they think with, whereas in women, the blood always stays in the brain, whatever emotional state she is in. Women are more pragmatic, and men are dickheads. I know this well because I am a man.  

TBS: You advertise the fact that you draw comics very quickly.
Rabo: Yes, in fact, to do something con el rabo means to do it very quickly. My themes have sexual characteristics and I do them very fast. That’s where my pseudonym comes from.
   

TBS: What is the process you follow of creating a comic? Where do your ideas come from?
Rabo: Normally I have no idea what I am going to do. I can start with an idea, a title can motivate me, a drawing, you could compare the facility that Mozart had for composing with my process.  

TBS: What is Rabo’s ideological bent?
Rabo: Rabo likes to mix three incompatible themes: religion, politics and sex. These three concepts are what most interest me to play with and the times when I’ve managed to incorporate them well are the times my comics have given me the most problems.
 
TBS: Have you been the victim of injustice?
Rabo: Yes, my wife hasn’t wanted me to do comics for a long time. She can be paralleled to Norah, James Joyce’s wife, who never read his work. My wife has never read me, she’s always rejected my creative work. Also, every four years since 1992 I’ve had a problem. In ’92 the PSOE, with Felipe González as president and Matilde Fernández as minister of Social Affairs, published a comic of mine with public money. The PP accused it of being pornographic. It was called ‘The incredible man with the shrinking willy’. The synopsis is this: a scuba diver in the Caribbean gets out of the water to pee so he doesn’t pee in the wetsuit. So he unzips and while he pees, suddenly there’s a nuclear explosion in the distance, whooooooo, and the nuclear particles affect his willy but he doesn’t notice anything. But after some time, it starts to shrink. It’s based on the famous 1950s movie, 'The Incredible Shrinking Man'. This comic made the PP so nervous that there were even parliamentary questions about it. One senator, who surely now is in construction because all the PP left to go into construction, said that the drawings of Alvarez Rabo were an assault against human rights. It’s one of the best things they’ve ever said about me. It came out on the front pages of newspapers.

TBS: Did it help your sales?
Rabo: Yes, it did. And they published a comic of mine in the central newspapers. Then, in 1996 in Italy, this idiot who has spaghetti in his head instead of a brain, was so stupid he recalled and sequestered some albums of mine and some of Miguel Ángel Martín, another professional comic artist, not  like me. I’m riffraff, he’s a professional. It was a scandal in the press. We were supported by Emilio Toscana—the Benetton photographer who did the photos with the white background—and Milo Manara, a famous Italian comic artist, and an important Frenchman. Four years later in 2000 in Portugal, due to a single anonymous complaint, the police recalled the comic 'A las mujeres no les gusta follar' [for which he is most renowned]. And this created another scandal with front pages, TV shows, questions in parliament because the communist party made accusations against the government wanting to know who has the authority; what police do we have that they can do this without a judicial order? It was incredible. Four years later I’d stopped doing comics and nothing happened. I published in Argentina, but unfortunately, nothing happened. I approached the editor and the police to do something to me, but they said no. I’ve published now in Italy, Portugal, Argentina...

TBS: Does it translate well into other languages?
Rabo: Yes, translating into Argentinian is pretty easy... And Bolivia, where the prologue was done by the minister for culture, Esgar Arandia, who is very nice. My prologues have an important concept: all albums by Alvarez Rabo have a prologue by an important person. The concept is that someone important with no agenda writes the prologue for a Don nobody. In fact I’ve always had prologues written by people with the stature of Fernando Savatel, an important philosopher. I tried to get Felipe González to write me one. I told him in my letter that I never thought he had anything to do with the GAL, you know about his dirty fight against ETA, right? He never replied.

TBS: Earlier you told us you were merely a dominguero cartoonist. What do you do now on Sundays?
Rabo: I dedicate more time to my family. I have a daughter called Yhedra, and a son, Jhonatan. The name Yhedra comes from a Colombian photographer, and the other, ah it’s the same, I gave them these names, let them deal. The girl is at this age; at 12 they change and stop loving their fathers, and the same is going to happen to the boy so I’m trying to spend more time with them. We ride bikes, we go to the Guggenheim, walk down the Gran Vía, go to mass—I go to mass once a month —the first Sunday of the month because I’d like to be Christian. I’d like to believe in god. I think that intelligent people believe in god. Stupid people like us don’t believe in god. Believing is only beneficial for us because your life has meaning. You die and you go to the ground or they burn you. Why? And besides we believe in black holes and miniscule particles that absorb bacteria, how can this be? It’s as absurd as the idea of a god in the clouds with a beard and a white tunic. We lose nothing by believing in god. Take the rules at mass: you sin, you confess, you’re pure again—it’s stupid to not believe in god. If any readers can give me a reason to believe, I’d love to hear it because I really want to.

TBS: How do you plan to celebrate christmas with your family?
Rabo: I hate Christmas, hate it. I think it should be every four years because it’s back again the minute it’s over. In Corte Inglés we start preparing on October 30 with the ‘Semana Fantastica’ and such rubbish. Every four years would be ideal. I’m in the midst of a campaign for people to have sex on Christmas Eve because normally everyone does it New Year’s Eve but nobody ever has on Christmas Eve. I never have, and I’m going to try and start.

TBS: What would it take for you to rise from the dead and draw again?
Rabo: I’m going to have a small subsidy through a friend of mine, Andoni Luis Aduriz, chef in the restaurant Mugaritz which turns 10 years old and I’m going to do a small, light comic for it with a prologue by an important person of the Spanish state. I can’t tell you who because there is a competition on my blog to guess who it is and they only know that it’s a man, he’s not gay, and he lives on the Iberian Peninsular.

But aside from that, I’d do it for money. If they paid me like Maitena: 6 to 10 thousand euros a page, I’d be capable of a lot. I’d even lose Rabo and publish as Alvarez. By the way, I asked Maitena for a prologue for the edition in Argentina and she said she would do it. I spoke with her, she’s very nice, she’s a natural blonde you know, she doesn’t bleach, she has Polish origins. Time passed and she hadn’t done it. I wrote her and she said, “my husband read your statements saying you don’t like my work”. And I told her that’s right, how could I like it, it’s for borgeois, stupid people. People who buy El País Semanal, how could I like it? I’d ask for a prologue from the Pope, from COPE, that son of a bitch Jiménez los Santos, I want prologues from anyone. But she told me to go to hell.

But if they paid me like her, I’d even do comics as stupid as hers. I hope she doesn’t read this but who cares, I’ll never ask her for a prologue again.