Posada – La Vida No Vale Nada y La Hoja Suelta Un Centavo
Cartoonist: Gonzalo Rocha
Publisher: Editorial Resistencia
Publication Date: February 2025
Review by Kevin McCloskey
Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) was the right artist for his time. His prints appeared in Mexico City’s penny press when the city’s population was booming with many newcomers who spoke indigenous languages. The level of literacy, even among the citizens who spoke Spanish, varied widely. The news of the day needed illustrations to boost sales, the more eye-popping, the better!
Posada created an estimated 20,000 images. His most famous creation is the skeletal cover girl Catrina. A calavera, or living skeleton, Catrina has become the defining icon of Day of the Dead. Gonzalo Rocha is a Mexican political cartoonist. He’s drawn many Posada-inspired calaveras for Mexico City’s daily, La Jornada, and this year he published a new book about Posada, the aptly-titled Posada – La Vida No Vale Nada y La Hoja Suelta Un Centavo.
His homage to Posada ramps into high gear with this powerful graphic novel. Ironically, though Posada created thousands of printed images, very few images of the man himself exist. Two small photos and a Leopoldo Méndez woodcut of Posada’s studio make for a meager visual reference archive.
Rocha relies on Posada’s prolific artistic output to add flesh to the bare bones of this story. He begins with Posada’s death. He shows us ‘Lupe’, as he was known, wandering the streets in his final drunken bender. Then alone on his deathbed, he is haunted by Catrina and other nightmarish images of his own creation. Posada dies penniless and is buried in an unmarked grave.
Rocha embellishes what little is known of Posada’s childhood in Aguascalientes, which is 300 miles north of Mexico City. We know he came from a large family. His older brother, Cirilo, was a schoolteacher and perhaps a revolutionary. Young Lupe certainly excelled at drawing. He found work as a journeyman printer in the bigger city of León. Eventually, he moved to Mexico City where he collaborated with famed editor and publisher Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, a master of sensational journalism. As fast as Vanegas Arroyo found or concocted news stories, Posada delivered the images for the ‘hola sueltas,’ single-sided penny prints. He drew anything and everything that sold: pandemics, approaching comets, gigantic snails, earthquakes, shark bites, and bullfights. On slow news days, he would illustrate tales from folklore, ballads of bandits and lost love. He drew his popular calaveras all year long, not only on the Day of the Dead.
Rocha dives into Posada’s vast library of illustrations to detail two of the most shocking stories of the era: a murder spree and a sex scandal. Francisco Guerrero was a serial killer known as Mexico’s Jack the Ripper. Guerrero slit the throats of numerous women, some say as many as twenty, before he was apprehended. He was sentenced to death until President Porfirio Díaz commuted his sentence to 20 years in prison. Guerrero was released, but not rehabilitated. He returned to the scene of his crimes to rape and murder again. In Rocha’s retelling, Posada forces himself to envision every ghastly detail of the murder in order to illustrate it properly.
Then Posada, it seems, would drown himself in tequila to erase his nightmares.
Posada also illustrated a notorious sex scandal. It was the talk of every Mexican household, including the Presidential Palace. At 3 a.m. on Nov 18, 1901, a Sunday morning, Mexico City Police raided a private dance party. Forty-one men were arrested, nearly half of them were dressed as women, complete with false breasts and full evening gowns. It was widely known that the police escorted a 42nd partygoer, a V.I.P., to safety moments before the raid. That 42nd partygoer was President Diaz’s son-in-law. Posada’s drawings of the dancers in drag with handlebar mustaches went viral.
The editor, Venegas Arroyo, was clever enough to refrain from naming the 42nd guest. The headline over Posada’s print was Baile de 41, which translates to The Dance of 41. That odd number was enough to signal to the President that they had uncovered embarrassing information. While other Mexican journalists were jailed by the dictator Díaz, Posada and Venegas Arroyo managed to keep their presses rolling.
Rocha devotes 50 pages to the story of the serial killer and another 50 pages to story of the the drag ball. So, the majority of the graphic novel is not strictly biographical, but rather Rocha’s imaginative exploration of what might have gone through Posada’s mind. As Rocha puts it in his afterword: “This book made from the meager scraps of Don Lupe’s biography and the desire to honor him in the way he would have liked most: with a graphic novel.”
A few pages of Posada’s artwork are reprinted in the book. It is worth noting much of Posada’s work was done on zinc plates. He painted on the plates with a varnish-like ink. The plates were then bathed in acid so the inked areas appeared in relief. This technique, now obsolete, was much faster than etching. Posada’s line quality, however, suffers from the shortcut. Cheap pulp paper makes his surviving images appear even cruder still.
Rocha’s art, by contrast, is sharp as tack. Technical advances in printing and high quality paper account for some of the brilliance of his art. Rocha is clearly an extraordinary draftsman, creating is a labor of love — a modern master saluting an old master. True, parts of the narrative are pure conjecture, but who better to enter the mind of Posada than Rocha? Rocha walks the same busy Mexico City streets that Posada once walked. Like his hero, Rocha has drawn for the masses and undoubtedly dealt with anxious editors and pressing deadlines. Rocha is the right artist for this project.
Note: This book is in Spanish. Hopefully, it will be translated into many languages, including English. Jose Guadalupe Posada and Gonzalo Rocha deserve the widest possible audience.
Kevin McCloskey, professor emeritus, Kutztown University of PA, is a cartoonist. His next book Wild About Capybaras! will be published in 2026 by TOON Books.
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