Word: raeburns
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...Raeburn manages to combine murder, drug abuse, rape, torture and comix criticism in the latest installment of his yearly journal "The Imp" (self-published; $20; 112 pp.) With each issue focused on a singular artist or genre - Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware and the religious tracts of Jack T. Chick have each been a subject - this year's book examines Mexico's historietas. Depicting every imaginable perversity these small, square booklets exist in a cultural twilight zone. While immensely popular, they are considered basura (trash) by everyone involved, including the people who make them, and therefore utterly ignored. Like a twisted...
...until fifteen years ago, Mexico had the highest number of indigenous comicbooks per capita in wold, according to Raeburn. However, the numbers have dwindled to less than a quarter what they once were. To keep up circulation many historietas, or "little histories," have moved from romance and westerns to some of the most extreme perversity of any medium anywhere. The Spanish names for this new subgenre must remain unprinted but Raeburn calls them "Ghetto Librettos." Aimed at the Spanish-speaking Pan-American underclasses living "la vida de cuadritos," or the hard life, the popularity of these books has expanded throughout...
...strictly "journalistic" purposes I picked up a few, including "Almas Perversas" ("Perverse Souls"), "La Chambeadoras" ("The Chambermaids") and "El Carruaje Diabolico" ("The Devil's Carriage.") "Almas Perversas" has the most notorious reputation, and it becomes Raeburn's touchstone. The issue I got seems to be about a man whose wife confesses that their voluptuous daughter is not his. He smothers the wife and gets the daughter drunk at the funeral, then rapes her. Once she learns of her true genealogy, she becomes his lover, in spite of his hand getting mangled in an unrelated, purely sensational work accident. Now handless...
Like the gonzo comix critic he is, Dan Raeburn went to the source, Mexico City, to learn more about these nasty little tomes. There he meets the creators who churn out 80 pages a week(!) for each title. A true cultural critic, Raeburn folds interviews, deep research and travel into an essay form that uses the little comix as a lens to examine everything from Latin-American history to the different uses of irony across cultures. In particular Raeburn uses the historietas to get at the Mexican way of life. For example, though sold openly on every street corner, these...
...Erickson sale also showed that great art can go down as well as up. A Raeburn that the Ericksons bought for $100,000 in 1927 went for $60,000; a regal Gainsborough that cost $300,000 in 1928 went for a dismal $35,000. A Holbein portrait also went for $35,000, which was $95,000 less than the Ericksons paid. The painting that took the worst tumble was a Van Dyck: it cost the Ericksons $200,000 plus two paintings, went for $27,000 last week...