Veo luz detrás de las viñetas, un fulgor traslucido, pero intenso como para poder contagiarse a toda la página, a todas las páginas, a todo el cómic. No podía ser sólo ésto. El mercado, la gran cesta del cómic no podía limitarse a varios centenares de artesanos del superhéroe, a tres docena de independientes canadienses y estadounidenses bienintencionados, al "autor" de la vieja europa o al rompe-moldes mangaka. ¿Dónde estaba el resto del mundo?
McCloud en su Reinventing Comics basaba el futuro del cómic, su esperanza, en el advenimiento de 12 revoluciones (¿ingenuas?, ¿utópicas?, ¿simplistas?), que habrían de 1) abrir el mercado definitivamente a todo tipo de público, 2) abrir el gueto creativo a todo tipo de autores, 3) abrir la percepción del público y la crítica hacia un medio eminentemente artístico. Cada uno de estos tres puntos (sintesis de los objetivos revolucionarios de McCloud) depende inexcusablemente de los otros dos.
Hoy, en el suplemento extractado de The New York Times que edita El País cada jueves, aparece la traducción de un artículo de Holland Cotter, titulado "Los comics africanos no son un juego de niños"; un reportaje sobre una exposición de cómics africanos en el Studium Museum del Harlem neoyorkino. En principio, una exposición poco más que anecdótica. Sin embargo, el artículo de Cotter plantea, sugiere, varias cuestiones de interés que merecerían acercamientos más profundos que los que permite una breve noticia de prensa.Está, por un lado, la cuestión del acceso de las minorías al arte, al cómic en este caso, en todos sus sentidos. Lo que en algunos discursos artísticos se da por hecho, en el caso de las narraciones gráficas ha estado en entredicho hasta prácticamente entrados los años 90. Una de las condiciones inexcusables de McCloud, la del acceso al cómic de grupos sociales, sexuales y raciales tradicionalmente excluidos, parece ir corrigiéndose. Hemos visto desde estas páginas la cada vez más frecuente y trascendente participación de la mujer en el medio, con un discurso propio y necesario. Parece igualmente aceptada la aparición de un cómic que asume las diferentes elecciones sexuales y que lo expresa en sus páginas, pero ¿dónde están las otras "minorías" raciales y sociales? Suena irónico (sangrante) que hablemos del cómic africano como una de ellas, igual que lo sería englobar a toda una raza o grupo étnico bajo dicha etiqueta, pero lo cierto es que hasta ahora a ciertos sectores, razas e incluso (ehem) continentes, se les ha excluido del discurso oficial; cómic incluido. Cierto es que, lamentablemente, en algunas zonas del globo el arte es un bien de lujo una no-necesidad, sin embargo, suponemos que por inercia, tampoco se ha escuchado suficientemente a las voces que pueden representar a esas minorías desde el primer mundo.
La segunda reflexión que provoca el artículo de Cotter tiene que ver con la valoración artística del cómic en sí. Ya desde el título se avanza que el cómic no debe ser siempre interpretado en clave de vehículo para la distracción infantil o, simplemente, como vehículo de masas. Existe y debe existir una conciencia artística del medio, una consideración culturalmente valiosa del mismo. Hay cómics que son puro entretenimiento, pero los hay que son verdaderas obras de arte (sí, quizás desde un punto de vista elitista, pero los son) y, como tales, merecen la atención de la crítica y un análisis concienzudo y riguroso. El artículo pone en boga, como pueden ver, dos puntos prácticamente contrapuestos, pero igualmente necesarios para esa futura normalización del cómic cuya bandera ondeamos desde este blog y que es cada vez más común en la blogosfera.
Les dejo aquí la trascripción del artículo integro extraído desde The New York Times y su enlace (si les requieren una identificación, como dijo alguien, ya saben que bugmenot es nuestro amigo); he escaneado también la página de El País (aunque últimamente algunas imágenes no se me abren en una ventana nueva, pardiez, ¿por qué?). Añado, así mismo, vínculos a algunos ejemplos de cómics africanos citados en el artículo.
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African Comics, Far Beyond the Funny Pages (By HOLLAND COTTER)
(Published: November 24, 2006)
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“It’s intense,” said the security guard as I was leaving “Africa Comics” at the Studio Museum in Harlem after an hour or more of up-close looking and reading. She was right. That’s exactly the word for the stealth-potency of this modest, first-time United States survey of original designs by 35 African artists who specialize in comic art.Their work is intense the way urban Africa is intense: intensely zany, intensely warm, intensely harsh, intensely political. True, you could say the same of New York or New Delhi, or any major cosmopolis being shaped by globalism these days. Yet every place has very specific intensities. Africa does, and they are distilled in the art here.
I guess there are people who still can’t fit the idea of “art” and “comics” into the same frame. But why? If handmade, graphically inventive, conceptually imaginative images — which describes practically everything in this show — aren’t art, what is? The same images are topical, and are meant to be seen in reproduction; does that alter their status as art? Goya, Daumier and José Guadalupe Posada would of course say no.
In any event, Pop Art and all that followed it long ago wiped out the notion that comics are one-liner sight gags good only for the “funny pages.” “Masters of American Comics,” the ambitious historical survey split between the Jewish Museum in Manhattan and the Newark Museum, is truly a masterpiece show. “Africa Comics” edges into that territory, as does some of the work in a tiny show ending Dec. 17 called “Political Cartoons From Nigeria” at Southfirst, a contemporary gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Not that entertainment is missing from the Studio Museum selection. Just the opposite: some of the material is just plain fun. We are on familiar Marvel Comics ground with the adventures of the charismatic Princess Wella, a kind of superwoman with a ceremonial staff and braids, created by Laércio George Mabota, a young artist from Mozambique.
And even a non-African can see why the schlumpy but wily character named Goorgoolou — in a series by Alphonse Mendy, who goes by the name T. T. Fons — has become a national hero, or antihero, in Senegal. With Ralph Kramden-esque panache, he lampoons social pretensions and embodies the plight of an everyman in a baffling postmodern world. Such is the character’s fame that a television show and magazine have been built around him, and he was a star of the recent international Dakar biennial, Dak’Art, where comic art, for the first time, took center stage.
Yet far more often than not, humor is a sugar-coating for disquiet. For example, a piece by the South African artist Anton Kannemeyer, who goes by the name Joe Dog, uses a charming children’s book style — the source is “Tintin au Congo” from the classic Belgian series, its racial stereotypes deliberately left intact — to depict a black-on-white racial attack that turns out to be a paranoiac neocolonialist dream.
Mr. Kannemeyer is a founder, with the artist Conrad Botes, of the graphic magazine Bitterkomix, which has tackled some of the most pressing political issues in a still volatile South Africa. And in general African politics and popular culture are inseparable. Most of the comics in the Southfirst show are direct attacks on past and present governmental corruption in Nigeria, and nearly all of them are by Ghariokwu Lemi, an artist famous for having painted 26 album covers for the Afrobeat idol and political rebel Fela Kuti.
In some comic art, political content takes an upbeat, utopian tack. More than one piece at the Studio Museum evokes scenes of ethnic violence in order to propose an alternative vision of peace and solidarity, exhorting a new generation of Africans to learn from the mistakes of their parents.
More often the tone is skeptical, even sardonic, as in the case of a sly, graphically jazzy account by Didier Viode, an artist from Benin now living in France, of the bureaucratic roadblocks encountered by Africans applying for immigration papers. Or in a depiction by the Ivorian artist Maxime Aka Gnoan Kacou, known as Mendozza y Caramba, of a noctural mugging as an elegant shadow play in black and gold against a solid blue ground.
Visually neither style is intrinsically “serious.” You can’t know at a glance what you’re getting into. By contrast, right from its opening image — of a screaming woman carrying a bloodied child, done in full-blown social-realist style — there is no mistaking the didactic content of a story of female genital mutilation by the Senegalese artist Cisse Samba Ndar.
Scene by scene it is a nightmare narrative with no clear resolution, though in other cases resolutions bring horror of their own. One comic strip, a collaboration between Fifi Mukuna and Christophe N’Galle Edimo, begins as a sentimental story of two children, a boy and a girl, fending for themselves on the city streets and dreaming of a happy future. Halfway through, the boy is caught trying to snatch a purse; not a major crime, one would think. But the people who catch him douse him with gasoline and set him alight. The girl embraces him in an effort to smother the flames, and she too burns to death.
Even by brutal Hollywood standards this is gruesome stuff. And pieces by other artists — Chrisany (Francis Taptue Fogue), from Cameroon; Kola Fayemi, from Nigeria — about imprisonment and torture are comparably fierce, flat-out broadsides against human rights violations. As such, they lie well outside the tradition of comic art as most people understand it, and closer to the alternative, activist comic-style zines like World War 3 Illustrated, produced in New York, to which artists like Art Spiegelman contribute.
The influence of Western cartoon styles throughout is obvious. No surprise: international culture is a tangled history of interbreeding. Nor is it a surprise to learn that nearly a third of the artists in the show, although born in Africa, now live elsewhere. Africa can still be a tough place to make a living from art, even popular art.
Finally it is worth noting that the show itself is a collaboration between the Studio Museum and the nonprofit Italian organization Africa e Mediterraneo, which is devoted to fostering cultural exchange between Africa and Italy. Several of the artists were prizewinners in juried shows sponsored by the organization. An assigned theme for the participants was “Human Rights.”
All that said, “Africa Comics” offers an inside view of Africa of a kind we too seldom get from museums, which, when they consider contemporary African material at all, tend to be all-purpose globalist in their thinking, drawing on a snall stock of market-approved figures. The show demands time and effort. The work is physically small and psychologically concentrated; it is as much about reading as looking; the words are often in languages other than English. (Sheets with translations are available in the gallery.) But once you get going, you want to keep going with art that can have epic depth and that always delivers the jabbing punch of news of the day.
“Africa Comics” is at the Studio Museum in Harlem, 144 West 125th Street, (212) 864-4500, studiomuseuminharlem.org, through March 18.
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