The South Bookstore is full of people. Almost everyone is there for the same reason: to receive a dedication from Ricardo Liniers. There are various books on the tables and some even wear T-shirts with the Argentine illustrator's characters. He landed at five in the morning and had just given his first interview. We offer him something to eat or a coffee, but Ricardo prefers to keep to himself, explaining that he will have dinner with Kevin later. He doesn't know where, but he says it doesn't matter because “you can eat well anywhere here,” he says with a smile. “They must have problems when they travel. I imagine a Peruvian eating out must be something like Albert Einstein, listening to ordinary conversations…” he jokes. We laugh and I warn him that I will see him tomorrow to discuss more about the upcoming concert with Kevin. “Now I’ll ask you more about the illustration part,” I tell him. How do you become a cartoonist?
What a good question. I became a cartoonist because my old man made a mistake… That was… My old man is a lawyer and he wanted me to be a lawyer. I think I had this fantasy when I was little. But he also thought it was important that I learn English. So he once said, “I'm going to buy books and magazines in English so that this boy can learn a little.” And they bought me Mad magazine and the Calvin and Hobbes comic in English. Instead of learning English, I learned to be a cartoonist.
So at a young age?
Tiny. Then one day my bank buddy came to school and had drawn a comic over the weekend. I was half a fan of Mafalda and Asterix. And suddenly I realized, 'Ah, can I do this?' Than?' And also Federico, my partner and I drew Star Wars… That's from the last century. You weren't born. I'm so old that when I saw Star Wars in the theater, as soon as you stopped watching it, it disappeared from your life forever. It's not like you looked it up later on Netflix or anything. Didn't exist. So the only way to have Star Wars was to draw it. And so I was a cartoonist.
I imagine that at the time you started there was more open space in the printed medium, but at the same time it was certainly harder to see than it is now. How do you achieve this balance?
Clear. I started drawing when all the magazines disappeared in Argentina. It was the 1990s and all the comic magazines that existed in abundance in the 1970s and 1980s disappeared. Plus, it was a time when the internet didn't exist and people basically drew themselves. There you made some photocopies and fanzines and gave them to your friends. Nobody knew the Internet would exist. I remember liking the newspaper strip, but nothing, the five cartoonists that were in every newspaper didn't leave those rooms. You kind of had to wait until they died. And at the same time, you didn't want them to die because they are your heroes. There was Fontanarrosa and Quino… It was a very unpleasant situation. But then again, since you didn't draw anywhere… It's not like I drew a style because I want to publish in Marvel or Marvel magazine, there was nothing there. So you drew whatever came to your mind, whatever you wanted. And that made the entire generation that grew up with me in the 1990s very different. Nobody wore anything. Everyone drew what they had to draw. This has advantages and disadvantages, you see. The advantage is that you draw exactly what you need to draw. You have to adapt a lot. And the downside is that you don't know what you're going to do for a living and your parents look at you like “Ricardo, I have a job like everyone else.” No, but with the penguins, dad… You'll see.
And today it is very easy to publish it, it is very easy to postpone it, but that no longer guarantees what the institution guaranteed, right?
Now it's a huge cacophony and it doesn't exist anymore, you know? It's like something everyone reads. Everyone, everyone is looking for what they can find. And it's obviously all much more fractal, if you will: a little bit. And no one becomes a mega-millionaire like other times, right? If I had been Schulz, I would have felt much more comfortable. On the other hand, we work on what we like. You don't have to be a millionaire. If I can make a living from this, I'm already exhausted.
What do you think is a cartoonist’s relationship to politics? In other words: Do you need to be informed? Do you need to talk about or refer to politics?
As an Argentinian, it is impossible not to relate to politics and publish it in a newspaper. The thing is, I never… Well, there was a really cool moment in the beginning where I was drawing politicians when they were kids. They were like little jokes, they were all shitty kids, but I realized I hated them even as kids. How it bothered me to draw them! And I said, “No, why should I draw her?” That's why I do political humor a lot, because the subject of a strip is politics: whether it's about abortion, whether it's about equal marriage… There were moments where There were political discussions in Argentina and I explained my position from the comic strip.
And do you think that a moment of political crisis, a complicated political moment, leads to a good production?
Argentina is… Did you see how you sit on a chair and start pushing back? Have you seen that there is a moment when you are about to fall and don't fall? This is always Argentina. We live in this constant moment.
How do you think things will change now after Milei?
Argentina is always in such a border situation. Milei is an expression of Argentine boredom and tiredness. But I have already experienced it in the USA with Donald Trump. The Americans also had an irrational attack because they wanted to give power to these characters. Just like Trump, Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, all these clown types, they generally just last on a merry-go-round because people say, “No, that was something.” And I imagine something similar will happen with Milei.
They are almost literary characters…
They're more than literary, they're comic strips. Because everyone has something… There's something in fascism and in the hair. Someone needs to deal with the fascism and absurd hair. Or through mustaches, like the mustaches of Stalin, Hitler or the strange hairstyles of Johnson, Trump, Milei. There is something between absolutism and capillarity that should be analyzed. Yes, it's an even stranger thing we do in Argentina. We won the World Cup and we were all very confused and said, “Let’s do something weird.”
How do you think the Omnibus Law can impact culture in Argentina?
I don't know. My problem is when someone in a position of such great power as the executive branch decides that culture is like the enemy of the people, that culture exists to steal from the people. It goes through like a line where the actors, the directors and the singers all want to steal from the people. And all we know is that the people who work in the culture work the hardest. Because the truth is that we do what we enjoy, which means we work a lot. Nobody is there to steal from people. Will you start singing and start a singing career for Rob? No. And then of course there are international structures, book fairs, music fairs, there are moments when politics and culture mix, but they are supposed to mix to create synergies, not for that reason… The guy says: “No, we “We’re kidding people.” I see Milei's problem primarily in a sentence by Oscar Wilde that says that some people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. I think that's the problem of someone with such an economic mind, let's say an economist. Yes, of course you know that a cultural event has its price, but it has value when many little children see the child and say: “I want to perform there too.” And that boy in ten years is Ricardo Darín. And there is someone else who sings and says: “I want to play guitar like that too.” And in ten years it will be the new Spinetta. And then these people like Piazzolla for us or Chabuca Granda for you, who leave behind things that are part of our personality as a people, as cities. There are sounds from Lima and Buenos Aires that these people made. And it wasn't because the actor Piazzolla said that I'm screwing up your taxes with the guitar… But well, Milei's problem for me is this: Milei doesn't understand the value of things.
And how can one defend the independence of art in a country in such a crisis?
Crisis countries produce good art. That's why we created such interesting art in Latin America. Because it's like a reaction, we have to protect ourselves or say things. In the age of dictatorships you couldn't say that. You saw Charly García say: “Who knows, Alicia, this country was not created just for its own sake.” Unfortunately, crises create art.
Sometimes I think we are going backwards in what was advanced during the authoritarian governments of the last century. I think of Argentina, for example, of all the work of independent publishers and what is being done against them… It's terrible.
I had a publisher and the whole editing process was always very difficult. The problem we have in Argentina is that we try it everywhere. We try direct specialism, dictatorships, democracy, neoliberalism with Menem, socialism… We go from left to right and screw everything up. We don't get a single one. Now we move to the right and it won't work either. Because there is something in our personality that does not allow us to limit ourselves to a certain minimum of conforming to a rule. We can not. They give us the rule and say, “Look, I’m going to go outside this way.”
Speaking of independence, do you think freedom of expression in Argentina is in danger from this new government?
I don't believe that. I think there are some things that were learned. Just as the economy does not work for us, we in Argentina have learned from 1983 to today that freedom of expression is defended. And when this man starts screaming, they will tell him on a popular level: “No, no, no, you don't have the right to say that Fito Páez sings or doesn't sing.” That doesn't exist anymore. I assume that we as a society have learned this.
I don't know if you've heard what happened here recently with Carlín.
If I remember. This happens a lot in Latin America, with political comedians. Because the problem you have there is that politicians, by definition, because of the personality of a politician, who is someone who needs to accumulate power, a sense of humor is like kryptonite. Because a sense of humor requires accepting that you are weak. Chaplin here, the humor is like: Look, we're all ridiculous. Do we agree? Yes. Hahaha, let's laugh at ourselves. The politician can't do that because he has to say: “No, no, no, I'm powerful, I'm not ridiculous.” And then the humor bothers them a lot. It's like they have no way to defend themselves. And if they have a semi-fascist side, they say: “No, the trial and, in the most extreme case, prison.”
Sure, but it actually seems like they place more value on the comedian. Here the police wrote a notarized letter against Carlín, which made headlines everywhere…
In the long run they always lose. It's like people who want to ban books always lose. Look at history a little, see? “Uh, no, don't publish Ulysses.” Surely Odysseus will be published here, you know? “No, don’t publish Lolita.” So surely “Lolita” will be published here and a lot more people will read it because of these idiots. This always happens and they never learn from their own stupidity. Well, let's go to Carlin and get the pencil. And no, it gets worse. It's becoming more internationally known… And it bothers us all when they try to do something like that. There, to people in other times without the Internet, without television, without media, people said: Well, you see, he must have done something. It doesn't happen anymore. We don't want people to be taken away from us.
Has this ever happened to you?
The thing is, I don't do that because I don't want to attract the attention of politicians, so I take half a step in the other direction. But they wrote to me in the newspaper. Yes, there were strips made about moments, at some point when I was making strips about missing people. Always the outraged lady who sent letters to the newspaper.
Do you think we live in times where we censor more or less?
Not less. Luckily, because the generation above me… I didn't have to live with censorship at some point except for a few details, but the generation above me did. People who had to leave the country. In the case of Oesterheld, the Eternauta comic book author, he and his four daughters, who were between sixteen and twenty-two years old, so girls, girls… I was lucky across generations not to have to live with them. I started publishing and then we started asking about other things. In the 1970s, only freedom of expression or freedom of the body was demanded, nothing more. Well, gay marriage and abortion rights have been around for twenty years, as if there were new fights and new spaces to conquer and new rights to find, but fortunately I never had to experience what continues to happen in many places around the world. . I have friends in Venezuela who had to leave, like Rayma, not to mention the children of Charlie Hebdo. Whether left or right, I felt the humor. Again, like the little boy who points out that the emperor has no clothes, the emperor is not at all amused.
Furthermore, in my opinion, humor is always fueled by the most sensitive topics…
Because the comedian is like an expedition member, and society asks the comedian to go to the edge and come back and tell us a little about what is on the edge of society. And then when you come back, you say it in a way that makes us all laugh because, oh, the edge, how strange. The problem is that when society moves and a comedian out there tells that edge, then they have the quilombos, now that you say, well, but look how they're making jokes with that in 1982. And well, in '82 the whole company laughed about it.
And how does a comedian eat? In other words, do you walk down the street and make note of things? Do you read literature? Do you watch films? From where come out?
Actually you have an antenna. On the one hand, you're like with the antenna, like the musicians. Kevin walks down the street, and when there's a rhythm or something that catches his attention, he picks up the phone and says, “No, no, no.” OK. I don't have this antenna. But I have an antenna that if I'm suddenly talking to someone and they say something funny, “Ah, stop, I'll write it down.” In general, my daughters say a lot of funny things. I usually give credit at the bottom of the joke. You've always been alert like an antenna to certain absurd things we all do. And again I am the first victim. If I make fun of someone who watches a lot of TV, it's because I watch a lot of TV.
And what do you think are the limits of humor? I mean, to what extent can you laugh…
No, there are no limits. There are no limits to the topic. It's not that you can't do anything with humor. There are everyone's limits, which are the limits of their ethics.
For you, for example…
In other words, I don't make fun of someone who is in a weaker situation than me. Or I try not to. Because I don't think it's funny, but that's what I learned in school. And there are many people who see this as humor. Making fun of another. But look, they laugh about it. And I remember when I got the dog and… He's fat! That's it! They always had two or three next to them who… And that's not humor. This is bullying and there are people who understand such humor. For me that is a limit. Now Seinfeld said something: If the subject is more complex, if the subject touches more sensibilities – the Holocaust, the missing people, the pedophile priests – the joke must be very well done. Because you don't want the joke to be misunderstood and then people interpret exactly the opposite. A lot is happening. There is a character that Fontanarrosa drew brilliantly. His name was Boogie the Oily. He was a Yankee cop who was half inspired by Clint Eastwood. And what the black Fontanarrosa wanted to say was: Look how fascist and racist the Yankees are, when they are fascist and racist. And every now and then people would come and say, “Oily Boogie is a phenomenon!” And no, no, no, Oily Boogie is a son of a bitch! But it happened in the movie Wall Street or whatever, they came and said to Michael Douglas, “What a boss that boy from Wall Street is!” No, he's a son of a bitch! So it must be very well made. Oily Boogie was very well done, but there are still people who won't understand it…
There are times when it is difficult to take a clear side. For example, in the newspaper we had certain problems with the Israel-Palestine issue based on the Carlincaturas.
Of course, what happens is that you have another problem there too. You have to consider who you're making the joke to. That is, who is the audience? Because I'm sure that now when we talk, you're making a joke, and you're making another joke with your boss, and another joke with your friends. It won't be the same jokes because you have a code with your friends who already know you – and you can go further and say something more inappropriate and your friends will know why you're saying it – that you won't say it to yours Tell your boss or your father-in-law. Because you have to stare at your father-in-law… So it's the same thing. When you publish in a newspaper, you don't know how many people will read that newspaper and whether many of those people will not understand the code. You're offside. You agree that they won't understand your joke. But I like people who just go to hell.
And which jokes do you like best?
People going to hell. I really like all humor. If someone does something to make me laugh, I owe them a toast, a crescent.
Are you politically correct or not?
No, and that is the problem we have now. Because politically correct is where the expression comes from. It depends on exactly how politicians behaved in order to appear. So it's an achievement. The problem is that now we all have these crappy phones and we're starting to act like politicians. Because we all do little gigs for the phone. Like, “Oops, look, I'm here.” There's a video that kills me: a mine standing on the beach with a trash bag, picking up trash on the beach, and there's another one that films her. When he's finished filming, he throws the bag in the shit. And you say, “This person, an ordinary person, is acting like a politician.” Because this shit celebrated us all. Now we all act like this. And it's of no use to us. There's a very good series called The Curse that analyzes this a bit: how everything is a performance now. The children who throw the soup can at the pictures. I would believe their heroism if they were half-dressed as ninjas, threw the can at the paint, stopped the oil and went to hell. But what does everyone do immediately after throwing the can into the paint? They throw the can at the paint, turn around, put their hand on the wall or whatever and look at the camera like, “Look at me, it's me.” My friends. My family. All. Look how good I am, I'm more moral than you. I'm better than you.' So it stops being the problem we have with oil and becomes a personal achievement of anyone who wants to collect likes. We all have this crap in our heads. So it seems to me that the politically correct thing to do is to harm us all.
I agree. Well, I think we have…
But do you think everything I said is politically correct?
I think so, but we'll see what others say…