Vanguardia y humorismo gráfico: La Guerra Civil Española (1936-1939) y la Revolución Cubana (1959-1961) by Jorge L Catalá-Carrasco (review)

Vanguardia y humorismo gráfico analyzes the evolution of graphic humor from the 1930s to 1960s, focusing on the comic strip in magazines belonging to the Republican and Nationalist blocs in Spain as well as on those published during the Cuban revolutionary regime.

Divided into three sections, the first part explores the correlation between humor and the avant-garde both in Spain and Cuba. Chapter 1 examines the rise of Spanish vanguardism and its intrinsic relationship to humor by effectively discerning their similar traits, namely, distancing effect and subversive character. Catalá-Carrasco supports his argumentation by mainly referring to Ortega y Gasset's concept of dehumanized art and Ramón Gómez de la Serna's definition of humor in "Gravedad e importancia del humorismo" (1930). Other literary and philosophical theories brought into play belong to Pío Baroja, Arthur Schopenhauer and Sigmund Freud, all of whom further the idea of humor as an intellectual and destabilizing phenomenon. Chapter 2 connects humor and vanguardism in Cuba by looking into choteo as a cartoonish expression rooted in the burlesque and the stereotypical association of black Cubans with roguery. Catalá-Carrasco provides insight into choteo by referring to the observations of Jorge Mañach, José Antonio Saco and Antonio Poveda as essential to understand the cartoonish production in magazines ranging from Bohemia and Social to Carteles.

The second part examines the graphic production of humor during the Spanish Civil War. Chapter 3 espouses the popularization of comic strips with the control of media in the Republican and National blocs during the Spanish Civil War. A variety of artistic manifestations are considered: the war albums of vicente Martín's Dibujos de Guerra and Ramón Puyol's production in Frente Rojo; the caricature and graphic humor of Luis Bagaría and Alfonso Rodríguez Castelao in La Vanguardia along with Antonio de Lara (known as Tono) and Miguel de Mihura in Ametralladora; the aleluyas of Manuel del Arco Álvarez for La Hora; and comic strips such as "Las aventuras del Cornejo", illustrated by José Bardasano Baos. Chapter 4 examines the press on the trenches through a series of comic magazines published during the Spanish Civil War. Catalá-Carrasco successfully distinguishes between the activist humor practiced by those magazines produced in the Republican bloc and the dehumanized and apolitical wit attributed to the Nationalist printed press. Noteworthy of Republican magazines are No Veas, Traca and L'Esquella de la Torratxa, which typically animalize the enemy while creating anti-role models such as Tomás Porto's idle soldier known as Canuto. Regarding the Nationalist bloc, La Ametralladora is representative of Miguel Mihura and Tono's comic strips, which, according to Catalá-Carrasco, respond to a type of humor based on the subversion of conventional and logical paradigms (142). Chapter 5 pays attention to post-war humorous production in La Codorniz once La Ametralladora was closed down after the war. Mihura's intention was to create a magazine that eschewed present-day conflicts in favor of exploiting the creative potential of imagination that undermined any conventionalism. In addition, La Codorniz was famous for incorporating the voices of American comic artists, among whom William Steig, Peter Arno, Gluyas Williams, James Thurber and Saul Steinberg were notorious.

The third part looks into the role of the Cuban comic strip with regards to the interconnection of vanguardism and militancy in the Cuban Revolution. Chapter 6 explores the evolution of the press in Cuba by firstly addressing practices of bribery and the allocation of special advantages to media executives during Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship. Legal magazines criticized the disinformation of official media, Zig-Zag and El Cubano Libre being the maximum exponents. Meanwhile, Mella, an illustration of clandestine press, satirized Batista's dictatorship. Once Fidel Castro took power, the...