Something burned in David Rubín’s head. It ignited him while waiting for a plane at the airport. He suffered a creative fire in every move that went to the next goal. And his nights in the umpteenth hotel lasted until he woke up. The cartoonist traveled and traveled. He was out promoting a comic, but he had someone else burning inside him. The first spark was “a post-apocalyptic heartbreak”. Although little by little he took care of and increased the embers of the project: fame, climate change, personal breakdown or the legacy of humanity. An idea written down here, a sketch drawn there. The flames never went out. On the contrary, they grew and devoured notebooks. Until, after a decade, El fuego (Astiberri) finally broke out.
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“I think it’s my best and most difficult book yet,” says the creator (Ourense, 45). And one of the most famous and respected cartoonists says it, both in Spain and across the ocean; a guy who manages to sell graphic novels in an industry dominated by manga and superheroes; an artist who lives solely on his talent – with the valuable collaboration of his drawings for the USA – a privilege that only a handful of names in Spanish comics have. And a voice that expresses itself in both its work and its opinions with absolute freedom and dedication. Some applaud him. You will probably avoid others.
Now the artist sits in a Madrid bookshop and is almost grateful that El fuego was made for begging. He started conceiving it after The Hero, his previous solo graphic novel, but he feels all these years have allowed him to make it the way he wanted. “In between there are 3,000 or 4,000 pages of my work. They help, as does working with great writers who push you to be more ambitious and overcome your mental laziness. I moved without a card. Sometimes I wrote things that I didn’t even know how to draw later,” Rubín defends. In the meantime he has also become a father. And humanity has suffered a pandemic. Both aspects are very important in El fuego.
The comics focus on a more or less distant future and the star architect Alexander Yorba. Rich, adored and happy with his wife and daughter until it is revealed that an asteroid is heading towards Earth to destroy it. As the entire planet sees the end of its existence, Yorbas is reduced to ashes. And from such an envied and solid lock soon not even the cards remain. Rubín draws fears and betrayals, bitterness and broken dreams, the most terrible loneliness and the desperate longing for love. The apocalypse is global, but also intimate. Another Spanish comic heavyweight, Fernando de Felipe, summarizes in an appendix to El fuego: “I imagine someone will define it as an ecodystopia with Dantesque undertones. And there will be no lack of common sense. Although it will be short. Very short”.
David Rubín, last Tuesday in Madrid, Luis Sevillano
Because El fuego wants to radiate all the power of the comic even without a single word, from its huge format or gigantic cartoons. The colors, the graphics, the beauty and the wildness of a collapsing world. The Colosseum in Rome has been turned into a shopping center and is also closed. Each of Rubín’s 250 pages aims to burn minds and hearts. “I know the tone or the violence may put off certain editors or people who feel offended, but that’s the idea. The culture I like is the one that moves you and leaves you with questions,” he affirms. Some examples of his inspirations populate the graphic novel. Another repeats it as soon as he can: filmmaker Andrei Tarkovski.
For this reason too, the Creator threw into the fire all the worries that crossed his mind. “Fire requires a slow approach, it’s a game with Russian dolls. You can stay on the surface, but if you scratch, you will discover many ideas. I think it’s challenging for the reader, my most experimental work but also the simplest in narrative structure,” adds Rubín. There’s the fear of not being up to the task, the cruelty of capitalism, the disappointment of the pandemic — “I thought we were doing better, but the opposite happened” — or the legacy we’re leaving: “I do like to think that now or even the day I’m gone my daughter can find in my works a marked map of what her father was thinking or worrying about at the time of each book and I even tell her things about myself that I don’t know. don’t show, or I’m not even aware of it”.
Two cartoons from “El fuego” by David Rubín, edited by Astiberri.
For example, when he wrote El héroe (Astiberri, 2011), he was enthusiastic about the 15M movement and hoped that another world would be possible. Today his view is more mature but also more pessimistic: “Life in Madrid is like a Frank Miller comic without the fascinating part. We are facing a dystopia where the cool aspects have been removed.” Rubín fights them every day with his words, his actions and his Twitter account. From there he criticizes the president of the community, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, Vox, anyone who deserves his wrath, from machismo to the privatization of healthcare or the culture industry that exploits the creators. At the same time, during the lockdown due to the coronavirus, she drew a short comic that ECC Verlag gave to readers to encourage them to return to the bookstores: Superman and a supermarket cashier starred, but the real heroine turned out to be her .
His opinions are not afraid to unleash fire, sometimes perhaps too much: he called former Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy “subnormal” or moderator Pablo Motos “disgusting”. But he denies having gone too far and re-ignites the fuse: “We suffer one lie after the other and politics no longer has decency. They say nonsense of such caliber and the next day everything goes on as if nothing had happened. Or they drop an even bigger one. I don’t care if there are people who stop reading me because of it. They are my opinion and ultimately reflected in my work.”
David Rubín, last Tuesday in Madrid. Luis Sevillano
His love for comics can also be seen in his work. Rubín innovates and takes risks, but always pays homage to the classics, whether with a nod to superheroes or a choice of style and intention: “Onomatopoeias come out less and less, they go out of use, and I add them often. It seems important to me to use the comic’s native resources.”
In fact, Rubín even used them beyond the pages. Anyone who buys the Galician edition of El fuego in certain bookshops will receive a print signed by the creator as a gift. And another of his recently published comics (Cosmic Detective, starring Jeff Lemire and Matt Kindt) came out thanks to crowdfunding and was only later sold to publishers (Astiberri, in Spain) on terms set by its authors. After all, this is often where the weakest link is. And the one that Rubín always tries to claim.
That’s why he wanted to release El fuego in the Spanish market first; and for this reason, in addition, it invites a dialogue that includes the entire book chain in search of sustainable formulas for all but the protection of artists. “We cannot have an industry without local creations. It is not feasible that whoever edits, creates or distributes it can make a living from the comic, but practically never the person who makes it. Creators need to have all the information about their work and their rights in order to know where they are going wrong and to negotiate better terms. And that creates better comics that sell better,” he muses.
In your case, the truth is that it works. It just started when magazines were closing and publishers were few and new born. But he managed to get ahead until he made a living from comics. Not even he explained why. Perhaps, he points out, persistence is the key: “I continued to publish a book every year, despite my ups and downs. I haven’t given up, I haven’t given up.” That too is fire.
Page from ‘Cosmic Detective’, by David Rubín, Jeff Lemire and Matt Kindt, published by Astiberri.
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