Review by Graham Johnstone
Manuel ‘Spain’ Rodriguez was an underground comix pioneer. In 1968 he created working class superhero Trashman for counter-cultural newspaper The East Village Other. The following year he joined R. Crumb’s Zap Comix ‘collective’ in San Francisco, living and working there until his untimely death in 2012. Most of his work was only erratically available, until this very welcome, and definitive, series from Fantagraphics.
Series editor, and comix scholar, Patrick Rosenkranz, describes the books as ‘about’ Spain. Mirroring his volumes on underground fellow-traveller S. Clay Wilson, these are artist monographs. Spain’s forty year oeuvre is curated into themes, and contextualised through a series of authoritative yet accessible essays. These draw on interviews with comix comrades, and include fascinating details, so building a rich and vivid account of a passionate man, and a life well-lived.
Earlier volumes Street Fighting Men, and Warrior Women, gathered mostly fictional work, while this third volume, My Life and Times, showcases Spain’s autobiographical comics. The biographical essays focus on his decades in ‘Frisco, but most of the comics recount his youthful adventures back east in Buffalo, a city Rodriguez (quoted herein) called “the mecca of restless youth”. Backdrops include jazz clubs, carnivals, burlesque shows, the Catholic church, and usually the streets – mostly in Fred Tooté’s erratically driven convertible. Stories span showing off, squaring up, and slowly growing up with Spain mostly fly-on-the-wall observer of events driven by others, usually eccentric live-wire Tooté. However, Rodriguez recalls and recounts these stories, with a clear voice, economy of language, an eye for vivid details, and a tolerant outlook on human desires and foibles. In earlier collection Cruisin’ with the Hound these quirky stories mixed awkwardly with the wild adventures of the Road Vultures Motorcycle Club. However, Rosenkranz has sensibly bundled the biker memories with the Trashman stories into Street Fighting Men, so making My Life & Times a more coherent collection.
Amongst well-judged essays, ‘Blab! Tells All’, reveals the roots of the Tooté stories in commissions for what was then an E.C. Comics fanzine. That illuminates the first story, which involves Spain and friends remembering that company’s comics, then projecting their trademark shock horror scenarios onto the crew’s everyday ‘haunts’. Brilliant details include Fred pointing at passers by who look drawn by E.C. artists. Blab! editor Monte Beauchamp recalls commissioning further Tooté tales over more than a decade, so fostering Spain’s more biographical responses to his ‘life and times‘.
The essays and comics leave about a third of the book for an art portfolio, including completed commissions and sketchbook pages. Rosenkranz explains that Spain was a restless sketcher, on any occasion, and on any available surface. He favoured invention and expression over exactitude, and that’s well showcased. The best pages capture Spain’s sheer love, not just of drawing, but of the people, places and paraphernalia that inspired him. Several street scenes are a delight, but ultimately there are more sketchbook pages than most readers will want. More consistently appealing, however, is his finished artwork – for posters, handbills, and covers for (real or imagined) comics. Spain had a flair for lettering, colour, and design, making this some of his finest work. Never before collected, it’s very welcome here.
A few more comics muse on Spain’s changing neighbourhood, and recall his abortive gig to report on the 1968 Democratic Party convention protests (pictured, left). The latter involves anti-war rallies, Beat poets, ‘Yippies’ and riots, providing the best reminder that Spain’s Life and Times were well worth immortalising in these brilliant comics.
Rosenkranz promised five Spain volumes, but three years on from this third one, no more had reached print.
