Review by Graham Johnstone
Manuel ’Spain’ Rodriguez was the most political of the 1960s underground cartoonists. His biker/activist alter ego Trashman enabled ironic explorations of the politics of nations, class, environment, and sex. Spain went on to impress with short comics about revolutionary leaders, (see My True Story). So, who better to tackle the graphic biography of Latino biker, turned activist and revolutionary poster-boy, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.
Che was a major figure in the Cuban revolution, and executed in 1967 for his role in the Bolivian Insurgency. This made him a socialist martyr, with added ‘live fast, die young’ appeal, and his image chimed with the 1960s counterculture, explaining his enduring visual currency, which merits an afterword by Spain’s learned friends.
Spain himself always had an eye for iconic imagery, prioritising clarity and energy over anatomical exactitude. His figures resemble monumental sculptures – their decisive actions and gestures, magically stilled by the artist. Students bounding up steps are as monumental as the establishment statuary flanking them. Spain also had a portrait photographer’s eye for the setting and moment to capture a subject. His frontispiece improves on source photos of Che in an office, here puffing a Cuban cigar, boots across the desk. Similarly, the cover portrait of Che, while familiar from posters and T-shirts, adds a maturity and gravitas that reflects Spain’s take on his subject.
Though now associated with Cuba, Guevara came from South America, and it was his adolescent road trip through the continent that radicalised him. Spain opens with Ernesto’s birth in Argentina, to parents with ancestry in Spain and Ireland: intriguingly, both countries brewing popular uprisings. The summary of Ernesto’s pre ‘Che’ years spans the personal (fighting asthma), and the political (the Peron government’s “rhetoric was harsh, but the common people benefitted”). As Spain tells it, the motivation for Ernesto’s trip similarly combined the personal and political: fleeing heartbreak rooted in class barriers. Spain begins the journey quoting the opening of Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries, but thereafter dispenses with quotes and citations, in favour of novelistic narration. He takes the reader on a swift ride over rough terrain.
Spain developed his craft contributing to pamphlet anthologies, necessitating brevity. His earlier political biographies supplied context, character, action, and interpretation in a few packed pages. He expands the approach here, telling this birth-to-death story in a hundred similarly dense pages. Spain takes us through Che’s formative years, and political apprecticeship, en route to his role in the Cuban cabinet, and further international adventures. The result is a richly detailed, yet page-turning account of a ‘lived fast’ life .
Spain’s narration is thoughtful. On Che’s diplomatic role, he notes Cuba having more in common with peasant republic China than the industrialised Soviet Union. However, “practical considerations dictated alignment with the USSR and its allies…” Spain highlights Guevara’s parents’ left leanings, but underplays family land-owning cited elsewhere. Readers may also wonder if Che’s divorce was quite so amicable as depicted. One actual error is Che playing the wrong kind of non-American football, but that’s one panel among several hundred, and hardly significant. Political revolutionaries incite extreme views, and those who want to find disagreement will do so, but most readers should find this a cool-headed, convincing account. For all his revelling in Che’s rock-star image, Spain presents Guevara as a serious man.
Che is impressively researched, energetically narrated, and vividly drawn. Published forty years after both Spain’s debut and Che’s death, this feels like the book Spain Rodriguez had to write, and it’s a triumph.
