Project
In the year 2022, José Muñoz, who has been living in Milan for more than fifty years, writes to Martín Oesterheld, Héctor's grandson, asking for authorization to undertake a new project with which he is enthusiastic: “I have a project that arouses considerable enthusiasm in me: to go back to work with your grandfather, do you realize that?”. José le propone trabajar con los “Cuentos de la Ciudad Grande”, la serie de historias que se desarrollan en Buenos Aires, escritas y publicadas en Hora Cero Extra y Frontera Extra entre el ’60 y el ’63. Son 16 historias en total, dibujadas por los jóvenes artistas de la época, entre ellos el propio Muñoz.
This is what Muñoz wants: to reinterpret, to remake. All the cartoonists were very young at the time, and this impulse now would give a chance and a rebirth to this Oesterheld saga and to his own beginner's work “Moving away from the evils of history and towards the goodness of the comic, what a pleasure.” Muñoz writes.
This documentary is proposed as an elegy to the city of Buenos Aires, evoking the beginnings of the Argentinean comic strip in the 50s, its direct impact in Europe and the subsequent tracing that reaches the current comic strip scene in Argentina. José Muñoz was just a promising young artist when he was called to work with other artists in the series of Buenos Aires comics “Cuentos de la ciudad grande” that Héctor G. Oesterheld wrote for the magazine Hora Cero Extra. Sixty years later, from his residence in Milan, already consecrated as one of the most important figures of the international graphic media, Muñoz will travel to Buenos Aires with the personal project of redrawing that mythical strip from 1960. Brilliant and charismatic, the last master of a golden generation will once again look at the city he immortalized in his vignettes. An ever-changing and revealing city that will make him meet again with his old colleagues, his friend the cartoonist Maitena, and with a new and thriving generation of cartoonists and scriptwriters such as Salvador Sanz, Sole Otero, María Luque, Juan Sáenz Valiente, among many others. From his drawings, he will reconstruct the fragments of his youth in those porteño sixties. Captured by a black notebook, they will open a gap in time and describe their drift through the city in the memory of a luminous past and an effervescent present.
José Muñoz
Born in Buenos Aires in 1942, today winner of the most important awards in the comic industry, from a very young age he attended the “Escuela Panamericana de Arte” in Buenos Aires, where he had Alberto Breccia and Hugo Pratt as teachers. He began his professional career in comics as an assistant to Francisco Solano López and illustrating stories written by Héctor Oesterheld for the magazines “Hora Cero” and “Frontera”.
En 1972 viaja a Europa, primero a Londres, luego a Barcelona, y finalmente se radica en Italia. En 1974 se encuentra con el escritor argentino Carlos Sampayo, acontecimiento fundamental que marcará el inicio de una larga y fructífera colaboración. Es así como nace el personaje de Alack Sinner, detective privado cuyas humanas aventuras, rodeadas de jazz, describen miserias y noblezas en una New York tan imaginada como real. Seguirá una larga serie de personajes e historias: “Nel bar”, “Sudor Sudaca”, “Tango y milonga”, “Sophie”, “Giochi di luce”, “Europa in fiamme”, “Billie Holiday”, “Il Poeta”, “Nei bar”, “Il libro” y “Carlos Gardel”.
Héctor G. Oesterheld
Héctor G. Oesterheld was an Argentine comic book scriptwriter and writer. He wrote numerous science fiction short stories and novels, founded Editorial Frontera and published in magazines such as Misterix, Hora Cero and Frontera, his best known series being Sargento Kirk, Ernie Pike, Bull Rocket and, above all, El Eternauta, which is considered his masterpiece. In the early 60's he wrote all the scripts for the numerous Buenos Aires watercolors he called “Cuentos de la Ciudad Grande” published in his publisher's magazines. He worked with Hugo Pratt, Alberto Breccia, -with whom he did the Mort Cinder, the biographies of Che and Evita-, and Francisco Solano López, among other cartoonists. In the early 1970s, Oesterheld and his four daughters became political activists, and in 1976, after the establishment of the civil-military dictatorship, he went underground, where he continued writing scripts, among them the sequel to El Eternauta. On April 27, 1977, he was kidnapped by the “task forces” of the military dictatorship and has been missing ever since, along with his four daughters Diana, Beatriz, Estela and Marina. In 1980 he won postmortem the Yellow Kid award, the most important award of the prestigious Lucca Festival, Italy. In 2016, El Eternauta received the comic industry's acclaimed Eisner Award.
NEW GENERATIONS
The very rich Argentine comic strip continues to bear fruit, with an editorial and commercial logic and an industry that continues to change over the years and continues to be an important source of work for a wide variety of professionals.
El presente del noveno arte en Argentina es en gran parte el resultado del traspaso de grandísimos autores y autoras de un oficio que se da bastante bien en estas tierras, “HISTORIETISTA”.
The Angoulême Grand Prix won by José Muñoz in 2007, at the moment the only Spanish-speaking artist to win one of the most prestigious awards in the field, enhances what was already happening with Argentine artists. The exhibition in Angoulême of a master like Muñoz, puts into focus a new generation of Argentine comic artists who are beginning to be recognized by the most important awards in the world. Sole Otero, Liniers, Minaverry, Juan Saenz Valiente, Salvador Sanz, Lucas Nine, Lucas Varela, Tute, Diego Agrimbau, just to name a few.
