To Draw or Not to Draw: Alberto Breccia and the Ethos of Reading

Reading: The Ethos of 'Seeing Things'

It is not often that reading—let alone the reading of comics—is identified as a "need," a function of basic physical "survival":

In Argentina, we were forced, as a question of survival, to use metaphor. … Readers often 'saw' hidden details in panels, which, let's be honest, the authors were not even conscious of—they had such a need for it. … A large number of graphic allusions … were evidently the work of [Alberto] Breccia.

(Carlos Trillo qtd. in Breccia, Buscavidas 105)

This is how scenario-writer Carlos Trillo looks back on artist Alberto Breccia's tactic of opaquing the visual in their collaborative comic Buscavidas. The embedding of "graphic allusions" is figured as an incentive to the inventiveness of subversive, counter-censorial decryptions (or, if you will, the counter-paranoia of 'seeing' things) by a readership subjected to the strict regulation of culture during the military dictatorship in Argentina from 1976 to 1983, the period of the so-called 'Dirty War.' At the time of the so-called "Process of National Reorganization"—also referred to as the Proceso—state censorship and repression were mobilized to mask the reality of the abduction, torture and murder of 'subversive elements' who were all 'disappeared' by the state apparatus.¹ To publicly denounce or directly critique this 'open secret' resulted in one's elimination or disappearance.²

Published in serial format between 1980 and 1982, Buscavidas epitomizes counter-censorship as the subtle art of suggestion and association, precluding univocal interpretation. Trillo's qualification that these unplaceable graphic elements are "hidden details" is debatable: if anything, they present themselves on the surface, sometimes taking over the frame, annexing the foreground while relegating the narrative elements to a tiny place in the background. Indeed, Buscavidas brims with text fragments, speech balloons with collaged text in foreign languages, typographical anomalies, punctuation marks, series of "yes"es (¡si!) and "no"s (¡no!), newspaper clippings, seemingly random forms, inexplicable background scenes, and other visual inconsistencies that require intense interpretive energy (Figure 1). These elements combine into translinear constellations escaping narrative control, creating chains of endless (personal) associations. They intimate that there is a hidden principle of organization, that their jarring presence is not arbitrary.

Figure 1.

Alberto Breccia and Carlos Trillo, Buscavidas (1981-82), 2001, p. 32. © The heirs of Alberto Breccia. Enrique, Cristina and Patricia Breccia.

These renegade elements posing as signs make us look twice, daring us to solve the riddle they present. Erasing them would make for easy reading, which, of course, is precisely the point. If only we could censor these obstinate, weird intrusions, so we could get on with the story. By the same token, this opacity is the condition for exercising interpretive creativity: it is an invitation to devise crafty ways of decoding 'enigmas.' However, these riddles are effects of reading, and not so much a matter of unraveling secret messages hardcoded into the comic. The pleasure derives from the construction of a puzzle we lay out for ourselves so as to enter the endless game of putting the pieces together, pieces that will never fit. The work produces a reader who is free to construct his or her string of significations within a context where the relation between word and image is rigorously policed. It is to feel the exhilaration of seeing something ('seeing things') one should not have. What, for example, is the conspicuous sign "Hoy Disney Festival" ("Disney Festival Today") doing on the page (Figure 2)? What is the role of a bemused-looking Mickey Mouse in this tale of misery? That Mickey and a rather maliciously grinning Goofy appearing in the foreground suggests that their presence is important and not just scenery: they are out of place. Rather than mere diegetic props they interrupt the fiction.

This impression is strengthened as they introduce a sudden change in drawing style through collage, interrupting the comic's more or less coherent graphiation. The concept of graphiation was introduced by Philippe Marion (1993), and refers to...