Life of Che: An Impressionistic Biography
In 1988, I was deported from Brazil. Brazilian police escorted me onto a plane to Montevideo, Uruguay. (I got a new visa from the Brazilian embassy in Montevideo so I could legally reenter the country.) After exploring Montevideo for a while, I hopped on a ferry to go to Buenos Aires, Argentina. While I was there, I made a point of checking out the local comics scene. I discovered many great cartoonists at the time—Quino, Fontanarossa, Carlos Nine, Max Cachimba, Francisco Solano López, Enrique Breccia and his father, Alberto Breccia. Among comics lovers. Albert Breccia is widely considered one of the all-time greats. I had heard of Breccia, but I didn’t know much about him.
The primary magazine of Argentine comics at the time was Fierro. “Fierro” is Spanish for “iron.” I think it was named after Martin Fierro, an epic poem written in the 1870s by José Hernández. It is the story of a gaucho who becomes an outlaw. Martin Fierro is kind of the national epic of Argentina. The comic magazine was published between 1984 and 1992. It was easy for me to buy up back issues in both Montevideo and Buenos Aires, so I got a chance to experience the breadth of its offerings.
I was interested in seeing Albert Breccia’s work in Fierro, but even more interested in Enrique Breccia’s work. He was producing a serialized story call El Sueñero, or “The Dreamer”. It was a kind of swashbuckling magic-realist adventure set in colonial times, featuring a mercenary called The Dreamer, who somehow becomes involved with mythological/fictional characters like the minotaur and Mr. Hyde.
Reading it was really laborious because my Spanish was (and is) very weak, but I did make a go of translating the third chapter, in which The Dreamer and the minotaur are captured by English pirates. It gave Breccia the opportunity to make fun of the English (the Malvinas war was still fresh in the minds of Argentines). The pirate captain has many prosthetic parts, including a prosthetic parrot on his shoulder. A pirate named Kipling recites a poem about Anglo-Saxon superiority. The minotaur and one of the English pirates (drawn to look like Winston Churchill in pirate drag) play a game of dice. The pirates are attacked by another group of pirates and succeed in wiping each other out.
Enrique Breccia showed himself to be a gifted caricaturist in this sequence. He is also a very stylish artist, influenced by the chiaroscuro styles of his father and Hugo Pratt (who worked in Argentina before becoming one of the masters of Italian comics art). But unlike other works in that style, Breccia drew this work in pen and ink, instead of brush and ink.
The reason I mention El Sueñero is because in 1969, father and son collaborated with Héctor Germán Oesterheld, a well-known Argentine comics writer, to produce a book called Vida del Che, which has now been translated into English under the title Life of Che: An Impressionistic Biography. The translator is Erica Mena, a Puerto Rican poet.
The Che in the title is Che Guevara, the Argentine doctor who became a key figure in the Cuban revolution. Che went to Bolivia in 1966 to try to foment a communist insurgency there. He was captured and executed in 1967. He was an icon to would-be revolutionaries. It didn’t hurt that he was a long-haired, photogenic figure.
Oesterheld was definitely a left-winger himself. The Breccias were more apolitical, but Alberto and Héctor had worked together often in the past. In the book, the two artists switch chapters—Alberto did most of the biographical chapters, while Enrique did all the Bolivia chapters. It’s interesting to see the two artists’ work in comparison. Alberto’s is more traditional (which is kind of weird, because in other collaborations with Oesterheld, Alberto Breccia’s art is quite experimental). Enrique’s sections are quite expressionistic, even more heavily chiaroscuro than Alberto’s art, and unlike his art in El Sueñero, this work appears to be produced with brush and ink.
This alternating approach works quite well. As a biography, it’s not all that detailed. The book is only 78 pages long. But using Che’s Bolivian diary as a source, Enrique’s section gives a lot of detail about that futile attempt to gin up a revolution in Bolivia. Che hoped it would go as it did in Cuba—with his men forming a “foco” or focus that would eventually inspire the peasants of Bolivia to rise up. Eventually, Che was captured by the Bolivian army and executed on October 9, 1967.
The Bolivian story is about half the book. It is more granular in its detail than the Alberto-drawn section. While each panel in the biographical section might represent months or even years of Guevara’s life, the Ernesto-drawn section is more a detailed adventure. A guerilla shoots in one panel and then is shot in the next. Guevara’s life makes for a great adventure comic, and Oesterheld and the Breccias are maestros of the genre.
I own two copies of Vida del Che—the new American edition and an older German edition published by Carlsen. I got the German edition because I was eager to see this legendary comic, even if I couldn’t read it. But it is worth comparing the two for the art. I think the Fantagraphics edition is better reproduced—the halftones are better—representing better design. But it has one profound weakness compared to the German edition. The blacks in the Fantagraphics version are grey.
It is as if the printer printed it with watered-down ink. Comics is a visual medium and depends on quality printing. (Indeed, American comic books printed from the 50s through the 70s suffer from notoriously bad printing.) The quality of printing of Life of Che: An Impressionistic Biography is dreadful.
Nonetheless, I’m glad I was finally able to read it. I think Mena’s translation is excellent—the goal of a translator should be readability first and fidelity second. I can’t speak to Mena’s fidelity, but it is highly readable.
The story isn’t complete if you just read the comic. Argentina in the 60s and 70s was experiencing political turmoil. There were leftist guerrillas called Montoneros. The military attempted several coups in the period, before achieving a successful coup in 1976. They instituted a brutal campaign of state terrorism against the left in Argentina. Oesterheld had joined the press office of the Montoneros. He and his four daughters (all activists) were kidnapped and murdered by the Argentine junta, as were approximately 40,000 of their fellow Argentines. (La Vida del Che was obviously not in print in Argentina during military rule.) The military junta collapsed after fomenting the Malvinas war and losing decisively.
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