Manuel Rodriguez (March 2, 1940 â€" November 28, 2012), better known as Spain or Spain Rodriguez, was an American underground cartoonist who created the character Trashman. His experiences on the road with the biker gang, the Road Vultures, provided inspiration for his work, as did his left-wing politics.
Early life
Manuel Rodriguez was born March 2, 1940 in Buffalo, New York. He picked up the nickname Spain as a child, when he heard some kids in the neighborhood bragging about their Irish ancestry, and he defiantly claimed Spain was just as good as Ireland. Rodriguez studied at the Silvermine Guild Art School in New Caanan, Connecticut. In New York City, during the late 1960s, he became a contributor to the East Village Other, which published his own comics tabloid, Zodiac Mindwarp (1968).
A founder of the United Cartoon Workers of America, he contributed to numerous underground comics and also drew Salon's continuing graphic story, The Dark Hotel.
Strongly influenced by 1950s EC comic book illustrator Wally Wood, Spain pushed Wood's sharp, crisp black shadows and hard-edged black outlines into a more simplified, stylized direction. Examples of his starkly forceful style perfectly match Conan Doyle's eerie stories in Sherlock Holmes' Strangest Cases. His work also extended the eroticism of Wood's female characters. In such classics as Mean Bitch Thrills, Spain’s ladies were raunchy, explicitly sexual and sometimes incorporated macho sadomasochistic themes.
His more recent work is an illustrated biography of Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Che: A Graphic Biography (2009). Published in several different languages, it was described by comics artist Art Spiegelman as "brilliant and radical."
Awards
In July 2013, during the San Diego Comic-Con, Rodriguez was one of six inductees into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame. The award was presented by Mad magazine cartoonist and Groo the Wanderer creator Sergio Aragonés. The other inductees were Lee Falk, Al Jaffee, Mort Meskin, Joe Sinnott, and Trina Robbins.
Death
Rodriguez died at his home in San Francisco on November 28, 2012, after battling cancer for six years.
Bibliography
- She: Anthology of Big Bitch (with Susie Bright). San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1993.
- My True Story. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 1994.
- Nothing in This Book Is True, But It's Exactly How Things Are, text by Bob Frissell. Berkeley: Frog Ltd., 1994.
- Sherlock Holmes' Strangest Cases by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. San Francisco: Word Play Publications, 2001.
- Alien Apocalypse 2006 (with Kathy Glass and Harold S. Robbins). Berkeley: Frog Ltd., 2000.
- Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2003. ISBN 1-56097-511-3
- You Are a Spiritual Being Having a Human Experience, text by Bob Frissell. Berkeley: Frog Ltd., 2003.
- Che: A Graphic Biography, edited by Paul Buhle. London/New York: Verso, 2008.
References
External links
- Spain video by Revel
- The Dark Hotel
- Salon on Spain
- Graphic Classics
- On Spain
- Lambiek: Spain
- Road Vultures and Rumbles
- Sherlock Holmes' Strangest Cases illustrated by Spain Rodriguez
- Che: A Graphic Biography by Spain Rodriguez
- Jon Ascher interview with Spain (1998)
- NY Times Obituary
- Interview with cartoonist Spain
- Cartoonists pay tribute to Spain
- [1]
- Spain Rodriguez at the Internet Movie Database
