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THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
Article: Max - Panoptica 1973-2011
Posted: May 1, 2012
Wandering the buzzing streets of Madrid, you can’t believe your eyes at first, when you look up and spot the giant cartoon characters peering at you from behind the soaring columns outside the Cervantes Institute. It’s as if the whole front of the imposing building has been transformed into a bizarre landscape, inviting you to step inside. Panoptica 1973-2011, the exhibition within, has travelled here from Valencia and Mexico City and is scheduled next for a four-city tour of Brazil. It offers a stunning overview of nearly four decades of creativity by Max, pen-name of Francesc Capdevila, whose trajectory mirrors the shifts in the medium from clandestine counterculture to high-profile recognition. Spain has its own vibrant history of comics, or ‘tebeos’, named after TBO, the founding children’s weekly launched in 1917 whose title plays on the phrase ‘te veo’ or ‘I see you’. Born in Barcelona in 1956, Max grew up absorbing both national and imported pop culture. Vivacious humourous tebeos by Ricardo Opisso, Josep Coll, Marino Benejam and other Spanish artists, alongside the animated films of Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, Walter Lantz and Hanna-Barbara, became formative early influences, followed by his discovery of local chivalric hero, medieval knight-errant El Capitán Trueno, and translations of Tintin, Asterix and other Franco-Belgian hits. Read the rest of my new Article on Max here…
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