Last Sunday I was on the phone:
— Are there any news?
— X, Y, Z and Fontanarrosa is dead.
— … Negro Fontanarrosa, the cartoonist?
— Yes, he had been sick for a while and just died.
— … (more silence).
I felt sad. It was like the disappearance of a dearly held relative. My brief time in Argentina — a bit over three years, 1982 to 1986 — started in me the love for the work of Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Luis Alberto ‘Flaco’ Spinetta y Roberto ‘Negro’ Fontanarrosa. Inodoro Pereyra and Boogie El Aceitoso (a quintessential Fort Bragg’s trained WASP) — Fontanarrosa’s most popular characters — have been with me for twenty five years. I felt sad, but I was not in the mood for a requiem or an elegy. Instead I wanted to revisit his great sense of humour.
It is really strange the things that one keeps: many houses and containers later I have lost a huge number of books, but almost no books or music created by the aforementioned. My clippings of ‘Boogie El Aceitoso’ (taken from Revista Humor) are still carefully folded in an envelope. It is in that envelope that I found one of Fontanarrosa’s stories, describing the superpowers of ‘shy, diminished, feeble little men’.
Click over the images to get a larger (~128KB) version. A quick translation of the dialogue is available below. In the translation M is Marcia (the Woman), F is the feeble man and B is Boogie.
First image
M: Listen Boogie. May be you know the fondness we Americans have for ‘superheroes’.
M: You may have read some of the adventures of Superman, Batman and Robin, Captain America…
M: but there are lots more: Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, Submariner, The Torch, Spider Man…
M: The Flash, Mister Fantastic, Iron Man, Giant Man, the Invisible Girl, etc, etc.
M: Well, look covertly. That man over there, he is one of them…
B: He doesn’t look very healthy.
M: That is their main characteristic, Boogie! Generally, superheroes have two personalities. In normal life they are shy, diminished, feeble little men.
Second image
M: But in their other personality, they have super powers. They get transformed.
M: Listen! He is standing up! May be he is looking for a place to change his clothes, put on a cape, a mask!
M: Oh, yes! He is getting into a phone booth! The typical hiding place to access his super powers.
F: Colenel Windley? It is me. Listen. I definitively dislike the faces of that hispanic couple who I hired in my company. I will fire them. You check their papers… I want them expelled from the country.
F: They have a son living in Los Angeles. Have them mixed up in something: drugs or something similar. I want him in jail and then deported…
F: Contact Puerto Rico so they are not welcome there. Panama and Haiti neither. I do not like them much… Very good… Proceed.
B: Hey Marcia… your superheroe is leaving with the same imbecile look as before.
M: Well… I do not know… I have heard of him.
B: Ha… super powers.
Note: There is a Spanish version of this post in Tren de Carga.
Keyword: Cotidiano.