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187 9 EL BULBO VS. THE MACHINE Graphic Artistry as Superpower The superhero takes flight, launching himself in a long arc over the city with a look of determination and righteous purpose in his eyes. In his sights: a monstrous threat to the innocent citizenry looms on the horizon, a swath of crushed buildings and terrorized victims trailing behind. The superhero aims himself like a bullet, rocketing through the sky directly at his target. The self-sacrificing hero, equipped with extraordinary powers—an exceptional individual who serves as protector of the everyday, ordinary mass of society—throws himself into the path of the oncoming horror. This embodiment of the collective good slams violently into the embodiment of antisocial evil (a crazed or subhuman ferocity, hell-bent on mass destruction). As the smoke and flame of a pitched, epic battle dissipate, the battered but victorious hero stands firm, order once again successfully defended and affirmed. Individual prowess—including personal abilities that closely mimic the flight, speed, and explosive force made possible by modern technologies of energy, transportation, and war—has once again served the common good and the common man and woman. If there is a familiar, even predictable, feel to this storyline, it is because, in generic terms, these descriptions of the comic book superhero’s exploits and moral profile hew to a standard template of the superhero genre, a narrative standard generally considered to have originated in the United States with the Action Comics Superman series in 1938. The schematic narrative outline presented above is not, however, drawn from the adventures of the vaunted “Man of Steel,” that globally recognizable popular cultural representative of U.S. Graphic Artistry as Superpower 188 exceptionalism. Instead of a broad-shouldered, deep-chested Anglo male, whose red-and-blue cape and tights mirror U.S. national colors as he defends “Truth, Justice, and the American Way,” in this case the hyperstrong hero hails from Mexico, speaks Spanish, and has a short, stocky body. Instead of a journalist who moonlights as a caped crusader, the Mexican hero is born from a picture bulb released from a discarded television set, brought to life by the magical incantations of an amateur television repairman in Mexico City. Behold: El Bulbo (The Bulb). A creation of Sebastián Carrillo (alias Bachan), with significant collaboration from Bernardo Fernández (alias Bef), El Bulbo is the protagonist of a ten-issue comic book series published by Mexico City–based Shibalba Press in 2000–2001, and in book form in 2007 by Caligrama. Although dressed up in the narrative conventions of the classic U.S. superhero paradigm, El Bulbo wears his cape differently, and operates at the center of a radically different threat environment. This becomes clear when one considers the same basic narrative structure sketched out above, but now filled out with greater specificity vis-à-vis character and context: In issue #3 of Bachan’s superhero series, “El Bulbo vs. Toyzilla,” the animated picture tube from a junked television set faces a Godzilla-like monster who stomps madly through Mexico City, leaving terror and rubble in its wake. Unlike the Godzilla of motion picture fame, however, this monster is not an organic mutant, but a child’s wind-up toy, greatly enlarged and set in motion by the evil Adolfo, another animated television picture bulb sprung magically from the same original event as El Bulbo. Adolfo is an evil doppelgänger for El Bulbo, distinguishable principally by his unmitigated evil postures and the Hitler-style mustache he sports. After having been vanquished in an earlier encounter with El Bulbo (issue #1), Adolfo has been restored to life by an equally morally compromised factory owner, who bestows upon Adolfo the visage of George Lucas’s Darth Vader, the supervillain of the filmmaker ’s Star Wars series. The embodiment of evil, in other words, drags along behind it an entire production chain of mass cultural authorship and antisocial malevolence. El Bulbo’s moral authority is also distinct from the U.S. superhero standard. Before engaging Toyzilla in battle, El Bulbo addresses the monster with a detailed , and somewhat lampoonish, civic discourse: “I inform you that the city has 25,000 street sweepers and cleaning services, who make their living picking up the rubble created by you and your kind, and if things continue they will soon go on strike. As a decent citizen, I exhort you to surrender, return to whatever [3.129.23.30] Project MUSE...

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