It’s been a while, so here’s another… erm, interesting piece of Mexican neo-pulp. This painting featuring a fanged baby only a mother could love is entitled Mi mamá me mima, which means “my mother spoils me,” and it was made during the 1980s for Mexico’s popular comic book/graphic novel market. Honestly, we like these Mexican pieces. There’s something a bit high-school art class about the execution of them, but they manage to work in the part of brain that generates bad dreams. This particular nightmare is unsigned. 

Mexico’s old west mythology is as strong as the U.S.’s, probably owing to the fact that most of the old west actually was Mexico at one point. That love of western stories comes across strongly in these cover paintings made for Mexico’s post-1970s comic book market. Many of them were made for the series Sensacional de Vaquero, or Sensational Cowboy, published by Mexico City-based Editorial EJEA, which was founded by Everardo Flores. The scenes depicted are incredibly chaotic and violent—everybody that can be killed, seemingly, is killed, including horses and innocent bystanders. The backgrounds of some of the scenes are interesting, and are worth taking a close look at. The creators here have names such as Beton, Nique, and Jaime S., while others we cannot identify because their signatures, while stylish, are illegible. The art is perhaps not of the quality seen on pulp novels, but it’s certainly effective. Twenty total scans for your enjoyment, and you can see a few examples here, here, and here.

Above are assorted covers of the Italian fumetto Pig, which first appeared in 1983 from Ediperiodici. Pig was reprinted in both French and Spanish, though the French editions ran into trouble from authorities that saw the content as promoting bestiality. You’d have to be a real prude to see it that way, because this is pretty funny stuff. An experiment gone awry has given the protagonist a pig’s head, and if he doesn’t have sex regularly he’ll transform past the point of no return. Since he has a pig’s head, the sex thing is a bit tricky, but through sheer animal charm he manages. So what’s your excuse for not scoring? We bet you have a human head, so quit your bellyaching. 

It’s been a while since we shared any Mexican pulp art, so here’s a nice example—it’s entitled “Líderes aprovechado,” which means “exploited leaders,” and it depicts the buying off of a politician. How unsophisticated—don’t they know if they follow certain procedures this becomes a perfectly legal campaign donation? They need to look north for inspiration. Anyway, this painting and others we’ve shared were made for Mexico’s cheapie paperback and comic book markets during the seventies and eighties. You can see a few other examples here, here, and here. 

Above and below, a revisitation of the Italian fumetto Pornostar, with cover art by Roberto Molino and interiors from Giovanni Romanini. A couple of websites say the physical aspects of Beba and Fiona are based on two showgirls from the Italian television program Striscia la notizia, but we checked and it turns out the show debuted three years after the comic. See our other entry on this comic here.

Since we mentioned in our Kennedy post that Mercocomic had serials about other historical figures, we decided we’d go ahead and share these Spanish Che covers from 1978. The complete run was three issues in the order seen, and the art is once again from the excellent Prieto Muriana, who even worked in a Pietà on cover three. “Hasta siempre, Comandante,” by the way, is a very famous Carlos Puebla song recorded by everyone from Joan Baez to Nathalie Cardone. 

A long while back we shared a Spanish cover of the Mercocomic publication Kennedy and mentioned that a series of six appeared in 1977. The same comics were also published in French, so today, inappropriately, we’re sharing those six covers from France with their excellent if unsettling art by Prieto Muriana. Mercocomic published serials of other well known figures, among them Che, Hitler, Mussolini, Don Juan Tenorio Garcia, and Quijote 78. None are strictly factual accounts, but rather re-imaginings of the circumstances and motivations that drove important historical episodes.

Above, exceedingly rare Mexican cover art for a pulp-style comic book about the mass suicide/mass murder of more than 900 people at the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project of Rev. Jim Jones in Jonestown, Guyana. That event, from which the current U.S. English phrase “drank the Kool-Aid” is derived (though group members actually drank Flavor Aid), occurred today in 1978.