Legendary Spanish cartoonist Nazario on his life and legacy: ‘We must always be vigilant’

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Nicholas Burman | March 25, 2025

The first ever page of The Adventures of Anarcoma, published in 1978, finds the titular heroine interrupted mid-sex by a call that alerts her to the fact that XM2, a well-hung robot that fulfills desires, has been stolen. She quickly makes her way into the streets of Barcelona, transformed into a film noir detective, amongst the cruising spots, parties and sometimes dangerous streets of the city’s old Chinatown. It is an audacious and explosive introduction to Anarcoma, one of Spain’s most famous comix characters, and a prime example of why her creator, Nazario, gained such popularity (and, in some quarters, infamy).

Nazario Luque Vera is typically dubbed the grandfather of Spanish comix and a key figure in the history of LGBTQ+ comics. Born in Andalucia in 1944, he was raised in the province of Seville, spending his early years with his aunties and attending a Salesian school. A student of Flamenco, and a literate individual who entered the teaching profession, he was one of many Spaniards who under the Franco regime were de facto criminalized and persecuted for being LGBTQ+. Like many Andalucians, he would migrate to the richer and more liberal Catalonia and live for much of his life in Barcelona, the city to which he is indelibly linked.

He initially trained as a painter but became interested in narratives thanks to literature. As a youngster, pulp adventure comics were also part of his media diet. Later, the likes of Sartre, Camus and the Spanish poet Miguel de Unamuno would inspire him. Jean Genet, the enfant terrible and unapologetically gay icon of mid-century French literature, and a writer intimately related to Barcelona’s queer history, is one particularly obvious literary counterpart.

Nazario became aware of the power of comics thanks to stumbling across MAD Magazine at a kiosk. While traveling through Europe, he was exposed to what at that point was the exploding underground comics scene. The covers for El Rrollo Enmascarado, the Barcelona underground’s first attempt at an underground press equivalent to the U.S.'s West Coast classics, drawn by Nazario, demonstrate Robert Crumb’s influence.

Also apparent in his work is the mania of S. Clay Wilson, the machismo of Spain Rodriguez, and a healthy dose of the homosexual gaze à la Tom of Finland, wherein the perception of male strength is drawn in order to reveal a potential sexual desire and pleasure. There is also, at times, a touch of the retro-futurist techno dystopias one may associate with early 2000AD, especially Ian Gibson and Carlos Esquerra.

His most famous strip is the aforementioned Anarcoma, about the titular genderfluid detective who solves mysteries — and has a lot of sex. Anarcoma was a major countercultural hit, translated into French, German and English at the time, and heavily associated with the legendary Spanish comics magazine El Víbora, which ran from 1979 until 2005, and to which Nazario often contributed throughout the ‘80s. The character would inspire Soft Cell's Marc Almond to sing, in a 1986 song:

And if the world is not enough
Then I'll take you to the sky
Put you in an arm hold
Blacken both your eyes
For you'll find no other woman
That will love you like I do
I'll just open up the oven door
And leave the cooking up to you

While the at-times pornographic nature of Nazario’s comics may put some people on the backfoot, and encourage others to dismiss it as merely lewd, a closer reading reveals that there is a strong vein of romanticism running throughout his work. Take Anarcoma. Yes, there is a lot of sex, nudity and violence, but the plots also revolve around friendship, creativity and romance. It is no surprise that some of the characters, such as Ocaña and Onliyu, were reimaginings of real people Nazario was immortalizing in his work. About Anarcoma, Nazario once wrote: “I was paying homage to the fascinating world of cross-dressers. This unreal world in which appearances are sublimated and come to constitute a shining reality in themselves.” His romanticism is also clear when, in interviews, he has talked lovingly about Alejandro Molina, the sculptor and Nazario’s long-term partner and husband, who died in 2014.

For me, his most accomplished comics work are the stories collected under the title Mujeres Raras (Strange Women). It’s here that his storytelling is most effective, and where his comix influences are present but imbued with his originality and painterly qualities. It is also in these stories that he most effectively utilizes color: the strips collected in the two Mujeres Raras books boast bold, expressionist colorways and pastels, and delicate but precise shading add a sense of depth. As Nazario writes in the introduction to Nuevas Mujeres Raras, while the underground has often been defined by black and white work, and has sometimes fetishized the two-tone approach, he always wanted to burst into color and eventually managed this thanks to special nibs from Brandauer, as well as access to higher quality printing processes.

A 1990 strip called Helena is particularly striking due to its depiction of light and details of an apartment’s interior. It has a general softness of perception that would be carried over into much of his painting work throughout the ‘90s and 2000s . One of my favourite comics of his is a four-page story from 1993 called "Siesta." It depicts two men post-sex, sweating and sleeping in the afternoon heat. The story's delicate follows the scene to an unanswered phone and closed French doors. It offers a sense of summertime satisfaction and is an atmospheric and intimate piece of work.

The explicitness of many of Nazario’s comics — the ludicrously large penises, the sweaty sex, the open polyamory, the exuberant gore — was a middle finger to the Franco regime and its censures, which were dedicated to the erasure of queer people. But the comics are not about them. It is a celebration of an anarchic and artistic spirit, and the lives of the people who knew that persecution and censorship were unjust, and had to live with their harshest consequences. During the transition to democracy, this artistic scene and its peers across the country would help set a new popular tone for a citizenry keen to revel in the cultural break from Francoism and restart afresh the sort of advances which had been choked under the dictatorship.

His education and preoccupation with fine art means that Nazario keeps the classics close to his heart. In Mujeres Raras, fairy tales and Greek myths are reimagined with a healthy dose of gender transgressions, and dramatic emphasis generated by a fetishization of much of what is in the panels. Here and elsewhere, there is a level of interest in giant phalli that would make an ancient Roman proud. Some stories are infused with the orientalism of Arabian Nights. There’s many a riff on mediaeval Catholic art, and spiritual themes abound; take, for instance, his deck of cards, each one representing a star sign.

Broadly speaking, Hispanic masculinity is more feminine than its northern European counterparts. There's a persistent campiness to popular figures such as the matador, and Baroque aesthetics that, while historically officially paired with an intensification of heteronormative values, is ripe for subversion, and has been used to explore alternatives to that normativity.The consistent depiction throughout art history of Saint Sebastian as a homoerotic figure (a theme Nazario has drawn on) is a case in point.

Nazario and his peers teased out the contradictions and subconscious of the hyper-conservative status quo, often wrapped in the Baroque aesthetics that surrounded them. Art historian Eliseo Trenc has written that Nazario’s comics can be seen as “a release of the phantoms of his own libido, and at the same time is a hyperbolic denunciation of the sexual taboos of the society in which he lives.” This was about celebrating his and his friends’ humanity and desires. This is why, amongst Nazario’s work, you will find images in which the artist sanctifies his good friend Ocaña, and even sometimes himself.

It was in the early ‘90s that Nazario got bored both with both drawing and his typical subject matter, and returned to painting. His watercolors display a sensuality and a softer eroticism compared to his comics. His view from his apartment on Barcelona’s Plaça Real is a running theme. In one 1997 self-portrait, Nazario is leaning out of a window of his apartment, looking down at the plaça below, the afternoon sun bleaching the yellow exterior walls. He isn’t looking at us and we can’t see what he’s looking at. Rather, it is a reflection of a reflection, on an artist viewing the tableau from which he has drawn inspiration for nearly half a century. The streets of Spain, Europe, and in particular those of Barcelona. He is studying a space with which he is intrinsically linked and which he, in turn, has helped define.

A little over a decade ago he moved away from painting and turned to writing. He has since written numerous autobiographical works, and sometimes even returned to the characters he first devised for comics (all available in Spanish through Anagrama). Criminally, and despite the rapid growth and interest in queer comics, none of his comics have been translated nor reprinted in English since the 1980s. In Spanish, his collected work is available across several oversized hardback volumes published by La Cúpula. Meanwhile, he has produced many photographic series and film works, often regarding whatever strange (or entirely quotidian) human activity he has perceived out of his window.

Nazario has gone from an underground legend to a celebrated name. He became so popular that a few choice pop stars took note: RCA would eventually pay him damages for using one of his images on the front of a Lou Reed album without credit. He’s had numerous retrospectives in Spain and France, and been hailed by art historians and politicians. At the same time, society seems to have gone full circle, with homophobic political projects gaining power throughout the West. Gina Gagliano has reported on the volume of comics featuring LGBTQ+ inclusive themes being threatened with censure in the USA. Meanwhile, there has been an electoral resurgence of LGBTQ-phobic far right in Spain and elsewhere in Europe. It is an opportune moment to remind ourselves of the kick against censorship that Nazario and his peers provided, and the freedom to live freely with and portray queer desires and dignity which that rebellion made way for.

This interview was conducted in September 2024. Many thanks to Paloma Opazo for helping with the translation.

Before we go back in time, let's talk about the present. What are you up to these days, are you painting or drawing much?

Now 80 years old, my life goes by quietly between writing, my lovers, friends, revisiting classic films and reading. I always enjoy re-watching the films of Bela Tarr, Tarkovsky and Angelopoulos. I have just immersed myself in the world of Patricia Highsmith through her diaries and notebooks and I have been somewhat overwhelmed. I continue to watch and photograph everything that catches my attention on the Plaça Real from my window, or I go downstairs and make some small artistic reports, like the other Sunday, when I was photographing a transvestite who celebrated their 99th birthday in the bar Ocaña.

Regarding your origins in Sevilla and playing Flamenco, I read somewhere that you trained with Diego del Gastor, is that true? What are your main memories of Seville and playing flamenco at this time? And do you still listen to flamenco?

I was sent to Morón de la Frontera as a national teacher in charge of adult literacy. I was fortunate to meet a family of Romani artists whose great patriarch was the guitarist Diego del Gastor. They were surrounded by a court of admirers and apprentice guitarists (mostly Americans from California with hippie airs). I bought a guitar and asked Diego to teach me. I attended many private parties and got a lot of tapes that some American would record live at the parties. Since then I have been passionate about the flamenco of that era, an era that ended with the death of all those "dinosaurs" back in the ‘70s. Today I still sometimes listen to those tapes, but I am very eclectic in my musical tastes. I like classical music, opera or music from countries like Pakistan or India.

Eclecticism indeed seems to be important to you and your work. Andalucian culture is very eclectic, with its combination of various cultures. Is there something from that tradition which has inspired you to take inspiration from different places?

For me, eclecticism presupposes culture. In my youth I was what was called a "progressive" at the time. A progressive was someone who had read a lot, had seen a lot of paintings, watched a lot of films, and listened to a lot of types of music. The "progressive" was eager to learn about everything new; they were a species that has now disappeared: the humanist. In all my works this mixture of cultures is evident and I try to make it clear to the reader through hints and suggestions. The scripts of my comics could be inspired by Catholic hagiographies, Greek erotic works, Chinese tales or tales from the Thousand and One Nights, texts by writers such as Oscar Wilde, opera pieces, or even paintings by Dürer and Bruegel.

What exactly do you mean when you say that the humanist has disappeared, and why is humanism important to your work?

By humanism I understand the interest in art in general, and in all its currents. I also understand by humanism the commitment to the reality that surrounds us and the desire to improve it by restoring values that today have been emptied of meaning such as ethics, truth, kindness and sincerity.

Was it being "progressive" that encouraged you to travel around Europe? I understand that in the 1960s you were in Paris and London. What are your main memories of those trips, artistically? Were you already making comics back then?

Initially it was aesthetics that moved me to spend a month in Italy looking for the paintings of Piero de la Francesca and the Renaissance in general. Then I spent a summer in Paris visiting the Louvre every day but also discovering the nightlife of Pigalle and the gay scene. I was 18 or 19 years old at the time. When I was in Morón and Lebrija, relations with an American and a Dutch friend who were studying the guitar led me to become interested in the world of comics again.

As a child I practically learned to read thanks to adventure comics. As a teenager I became interested in reading novels and plays. I wrote diaries, poems and some short stories. One day, walking through Seville, I discovered that in a kiosk they were selling American magazines called MAD. I didn't know English, but the style of the drawings seduced me and made me think about the possibility of showing my writings in comic form. I knew how to paint, but I couldn't draw very well. Suddenly, my interest in comics made me forget, and almost belittle, the interest I had felt until then in painting. Vehement as I am, gypsy singing and flamenco guitar made me discard any other kind of music. At the same time, my interest in comics made me spend a month at my Dutch friend's house in The Hague and I didn't think of visiting any museum despite having been (and remaining) a fervent admirer of Van Gogh, Rembrandt and Vermeer. I did, however, visit many comic book shops where I bought numerous copies of Crumb, Clay Willson (my favorite) and Shelton.

In Anarcoma and other work, you demonstrate a lot of artistic and philosophical freedom, especially given the political context. What was it about the comics form that seemed radical to you, or made you think you could be radical in the medium? Was there something about being able to print and sell directly to readers which appealed to you?

At the beginning I thought that comics were a mass medium that could reach all kinds of audiences as opposed to the "unique" work in the hands of private collectors. Comics could have direct influence on the general public, like a pamphlet. In fact, the first drawing I published on my arrival in Barcelona was a two-sided sheet with drawings and texts denouncing the behavior of the mayor at the time, who didn’t care about the well-being of the working-class neighborhoods. These pamphlets were meant to be thrown in the streets for people to pick up and read.

I thought that a message in comic form could reach the public more easily. Being more used to writing than drawing, I thought that comics were the ideal medium in which to tell my stories with drawings and text. At first, my homosexuality and the repression I had suffered since I was a child moved me to invent stories and illustrations (though the first ones were quite shy and somewhat ambiguous) in which the emphasis was on denouncing this repression. I created my stories by trying to act with complete freedom, without caring whether I could publish them or not. In fact, I was forced to publish the most explicit ones in the Paris-based magazine ZINC and, later, clandestinely in Spain in a comic that I published. I only made a print run of 300 copies, which were sold hand to hand. It was called La Piraña Divina (The Divine Piranha).

Not all the comics I could think of were impossible to publish under Franco's dictatorship and the more ambiguous stories I drew I was able to publish in the comics we edited with the group I had created called "El Rrollo." We had problems with censorship, but at that time our work was ... made in order to break the repressive schemes a bit. There were stories that I had to publish clandestinely, and a couple of years later I published them in an album and the censors didn't say anything. At the end of the ‘70s there were many magazines that tried to break these schemes and by 1979 I was able to publish the first pages of Anarcoma without the censors intervening. With Anarcoma, my period of denouncing the repression of homosexuality had come to an end and I believed that, by drawing comics in which homosexual characters showed themselves freely, I was contributing to the normalization of homosexuality. This was helped by publishing the adventures of a transvestite detective, not in a gay magazine, but in a heterosexual magazine that could be seen by all kinds of audiences. There are many homosexuals who have thanked me for publishing these stories because they have helped them to be able to freely show their homosexuality.

What are your memories and reflections on that transition out of Francoism? It was a very creative time for the Spanish counterculture. (International readers may have already heard of the "Movida madrileña.") Did it feel like a collective moment, or was it more fractured?

Barcelona was the birthplace of everything that was later trivialized in Madrid with the so-called Movida Madrileña. Barcelona was a stopover for hippies on their way to Ibiza, it was directly and closely influenced by the French May ‘68 protests. The first gay demonstrations in Spain were held here, the first homosexual or feminist liberation movements were created, the Jornadas Libertarias took place in Barcelona, which attracted intellectuals from all over Europe. It was the cradle of all the most “daring” magazines of the time, given that most of the publishing houses were in Barcelona, and the underground movement was born, clearly influenced by North America, but also parallel to the same movements in France, Italy and Germany.

At the end of the 1970s, the city began to suffer repression and "provinciality," due to the right-wing dominating politics. Repression, arrests, raids and the appearance of heroin ended up making the whole countercultural world born under Francoism disappear. And so Madrid became a Mecca for all the provincial youth who wanted to attend the discotheques, concerts and exhibitions that took place there, thanks to a progressive city council.

In Barcelona, a whole series of creative movements had been brewing almost underground, and when Franco died, everything blossomed into groups in previously banned theaters, singers whose concerts had previously been cancelled, and groups of artists and painters (some of them from Madrid) seeking the attraction of a city in ferment. I tried to portray these years in a book full of photographs and documents in which numerous protagonists of this period participated with their texts. La Barcelona de los 70s vista por Nazario y sus amigos was an attempt to portray that period. It was difficult to find a publisher, but in the end it was published and even a little later, when the edition was sold out, in an exhibition sponsored by the City Council and held on the Ramblas, the book was republished and considered to be the "Bible" of Barcelona in the 1970s.

I managed to track down that book, La Barcelona de los 70s, and also the exhibition book for the show at La Virreina. I noted that in the introduction the city mayor at the time was very vocal in celebrating you. Was that the first time you had had official recognition? Was it strange for you to be celebrated by the city in this way, or maybe it was more a moment of pride?

In 1999 I was commissioned to create the poster for the city's festivities (every year they used to commission work from well-known artists). The mayor asked me to emphasize racial integration. I was used to portraying the Plaça Real (where I live) from my window in many paintings, illustrations and comics. The poster showed the window from which I could see the square where giants appeared (pairs of huge figures with papier-mâché heads and hands, wearing dressed in costumes, who stroll around the city for these festivities). One of them represented a kind of Arab king. I drew the letters of the poster in Arabic typography and the poster was a great success at official and popular level. The Archbishop denounced the poster in a speech in the cathedral as unreligious. The entire press and the city council rushed to the poster's defense. It got a great reception throughout the city.

In 2000, I had held a large retrospective exhibition in Cádiz and then in Seville, and I offered to show it in Barcelona. It was held in 2002 at the Palacio de la Virreina on the Ramblas and was a great success. I decorated a long corridor surrounding a courtyard with a collage of plotters with my collection of photos, album covers and posters of the most important events that had taken place in the city during the ‘70s. Once the exhibition was over, I decided to start working with all this documentation, collecting texts from friends and acquaintances who had actively participated in the cultural and social life during those years. In the end I finished the book La Barcelona de los 70, which I was able to publish two years later. It wasn't easy to find a publisher in this city of publishing houses and I managed to find a publisher outside Catalonia. Today the two editions of this book are out of print and I decided to create the blog nazarioluque.com, where I published the contents of the book.

There was a story briefly mentioned in that book which caught my attention, I wondered if you had more details. It mentioned that you had at one point done some art for some propaganda commissioned by a radical priest. Is that true? Can you remember anything about the work?

Earlier I mentioned the drawings I made to illustrate a pamphlet. The full story is that I went to Barcelona to work in a children's school as a public teacher. It was a way of introducing me to the city, thinking of spending a year working, drawing stories and trying to contact comic artists who did something similar to what I was doing. At school I had a lot of difficulties because I had decided to implement the The Little Red Schoolbook and the teachings of the Summerhill school. It was risky and I had problems with the headmaster and some teachers. All the children knew that I drew well and this reached the ears of a communist priest of the Workers' Commissions who decided to pay me a visit at my home and ask me if I wanted to collaborate in the illustration of some pamphlets in which I wanted to denounce the little attention that the mayor of the city was devoting to the working-class neighborhoods. In this way, turning the pamphlet into a kind of comic strip, I was able to publish something for the first time in my life.

Going back to the immediate post-Franco phase for a moment: you already mentioned the artistic scene in Barcelona. There was an explosion of music, plastic and performing arts at this time. You were friends with Ocaña, a figure who made a big impact on the city and has been remembered recently in a book dedicated to her memory (which you contributed to). For those who are unaware, could you speak a little bit about your friendship with Ocaña, and why they made such a big impact on the city and your work?

Ocaña was a great actor, performer and exhibitionist who chose the Ramblas for his performances. An emigrant from a small town in Seville, he sought to make a living in Barcelona and "liberate himself" as a homosexual. He took up painting and spent his life in Barcelona insisting on being a painter and famous. He unashamedly showed his homosexuality in public and liked to dress up in women's clothes. He was neither a transvestite or transgender. Ocaña was a "loca" who recited poetry by García Lorca, sang and acted. His painting was spontaneous, with quick strokes and he enjoyed painting watercolors and, in the last years of his life, with acrylic paints. Oil painting robbed him of spontaneity. He became an icon of Barcelona in the ‘70s and his big success came from the film director Ventura Pons with the film Retrato Intermitente, which was shown all over the world and became a reference point for LGTBI+ cinema.

I moved in a heterosexual environment in the underground cartoonists' commune. At that time and in that environment sexuality was practiced freely and there were some heterosexuals who had sexual relations with me as well as some women. When I met Ocaña and his inseparable friend and protégé Camilo, whom he always exhibited at his side as a beautiful companion, the doors of a Barcelona of homosexuals of all kinds, predominantly artists, were opened to me.

Together with Camilo, we formed a trio that exhibited ourselves in the streets of Barcelona, at festivals and concerts, often stripping naked to demonstrate our uninhibition. This kind of quarrel that usually exists between artists in the same line of work didn't exist between us, as I was famous, not as a painter, but as a comic artist. Together we spent three days in the "La Model" prison in Barcelona accused of public scandal and incitement to riot. One afternoon we had both gone out in disguise for a stroll along the Ramblas and were talking to friends who frequented a famous bar on the Ramblas. Ocaña began to act as usual and at one point the Guardia Urbana arrived and asked us to go with them. Ocaña ran away and they caught him and dragged him away. They took us to the police station and the friends who were in the bar and the transvestites who were walking along the Ramblas rioted and began to throw tables and chairs at the police, leading to a confrontation. At the police station they beat us up and we consoled ourselves by listening to the homosexuals and transvestites who had organized a spontaneous demonstration calling for our release. In prison we met some members of a famous theatre group who had been imprisoned for a play they had performed.

There's a great video on YouTube of the three of you parading down the Rambla. I'm not sure what year it's from. Can you remember what sort of reactions you gained from the general public? Were you seeing these street "performances" as political in any way?

The documentary Ocaña retrato intermitente by director Ventura Pons was shot in 1978. Many of the scenes in the film are inspired by the life that Ocaña, myself and friends had been living for several years. The walks along the Ramblas and the bars we frequented appear in the documentary, which in my opinion is somewhat "stiff" as it tries to represent scenes from real life "dramatized," something like an imitation of reality. I refused to participate more actively in the film, firstly because it was one of the times in my life when my alcohol addiction was most pronounced, and secondly because I didn't agree with the director's ideas about the film.

We used to have fun on a daily basis dressing up and showing off on the Ramblas. We were having fun and we weren't claiming anything at all. It never even occurred to us to join political homosexual groups. Our behavior was rather anarchist. The film was a great success both nationally and internationally. The public had as much fun watching Ocaña's film as they did reading Anarcoma's adventures.

Going back to your art – across your comics and your paintings, you have always utilized color. You write in one of the Mujeres Raras books that you weren't very interested in the focus on black and white that alternative comics usually had. What has been your approach to color, and why was using color so important to you?

One day you realize that using black and white in drawings was not an option, it was a necessity. If it was difficult to publish stories in black and white, it was almost impossible to publish them in color because of funding difficulties. We sometimes resorted to the use of "two-tone" to simulate color. Not even the first covers of the comics we did were in color. We couldn't afford it. We tried to achieve the volumes with gradients using fine German Brandawer nibs. The result was drawings in Crumb’s style. As soon as we were offered the possibility of being able to publish illustrations or covers in color we were all happy to get them done. In 1979 I started publishing the first 6 pages of Anarcoma in black and white because the magazine couldn't afford to publish them in color. However, I was able to publish the colour pages of "Abecedario para Mariquitas" in a magazine that had the means. I always loved working with color, but either due to a lack of means, the poor quality of the paper used by El Víbora or the poor quality of the printing, I was forced to indicate to the engraver the colors I wanted to use and they did it. Later, with the discovery of aniline dyes brought to me from New York, I was able to achieve the quality and color gradients I had always wanted.

What artists do you take inspiration from when it comes to line style and color? Both comics artists and from the wider art world. I sometimes see an art nouveau influence in your work.

The discovery of MAD Magazine and within it, a cartoonist whom I consider "irrelevant," as Sos Clarke was, revealed to me me a way of making comics that none of the many well-known cartoonists in Spain had managed to do. There was a Dutch magazine from 1968, the Real Free Press, whose typography influenced me enormously. Then there was Crumb's drawings and, above all, Clay Willson's baroque and erotic scenes attracted me enormously. Also, the narrative of Will Eisner, whom I consider the best comic book artist in history, with his character The Spirit; they had a great influence on Anarcoma. Almost as much as Forest's Barbarella adventures. Being self-taught and pretending to tell the story of the scripts I wrote with the drawing, I never emphasized, like other artists did, to create a graphic style. Of course, all my cultural knowledge and my knowledge of Renaissance paintings must have been present in my work, both in the scenographies and in the use of color. The works of Carpaccio, Dürer or Bruegel would always be present, but there was one artist who influenced me enormously with his colors and erotic themes: the Belgian Felicien Rops. The Pre-Raphaelite painters also.

Anarcoma became a popular character, and El Víbora was a popular magazine, especially given that it was an adult comics magazine. Why do you think Anarcoma and that generation of alternative comics won so many readers?

In Spain, comics magazines with good illustrators dedicated to science fiction had disappeared. The magazines with the highest circulation were dedicated to publishing stories by classic American, French or Italian illustrators. The illustrators who had formed the El Rrollo group made comics with current topics that concerned young people: sex, drugs or music. It was normal that a magazine made by young people would interest a young public eager to be told real stories and not fantasy ones. The editor who had taken the risk without knowing whether the magazine would sell or not was the first to be surprised by the success. We had emerged from a dictatorship and people needed freedom and the magazine El Víbora provided them with characters who lived in freedom.

Where did the idea for Robot XM2 come from? That character seems like a good precursor to today’s discussions around the intersection between sex and technology.

Barbarella by Jean-Claude Forest, of course. In that story, there is a “master locksmith" who invents a machine that can kill with pleasure. A robot named Aiktor also appears in the same work, who has extraordinary sexual relations with the protagonist. I decided to create two homosexual scientists who gave life, like Frankenstein, to men made from human parts that they keep in various containers. One of them is passionate about dark, hairy, bald and gifted men and makes one that he will name XM2. Of course, he is the archetype of the men I like. I invented the peculiarity of having a button in his navel that, by simply pressing it, his member is activated like a lever. I had fun with his erotic adventures being used by men or women. For the second part of Anarcoma I decided to "humanize" him, losing his alpha male character to become a man who likes to cross-dress and perform in drag clubs. In the script for the third part, which I did not draw, but did publish in a book called New Adventures of Anarcoma and the Robot XM2, the robot decides to become a woman and prostitutes herself with Anarcoma, in order to earn money and have an operation. In a bizarre delirium, at the end of the story, now a woman, he is convinced by another transsexual to take the habit and become a nun of a fundamentalist Catholic sect.

You’ve always drawn on a lot of religious imagery. What has been the purpose of utilizing religious iconography? Were you raised a Catholic, and do you remain a religious person?

I suffered a religious education by my mother, and by the priests at the boarding school where I spent two years. I suffered also throughout my adolescence from a guilt complex. Books and friends influenced me to abandon these beliefs. I looked for substitutes for my beliefs in Kierkegaard, Spinoza or the Tao, and in the end I abandoned all kinds of transcendental and religious concerns. On the other hand, being Andalusian and Sevillian means that religious iconography remains quite ingrained in my subconscious. I always perceived Virgins, Christs, saints and martyrs in my works. I don’t think I have made fun of them, but rather I have used this iconography in a satirical or aesthetic sense.

You mentioned playing with and subverting alpha male stereotypes. When did you become aware that you thought those sorts of stereotypes should be satirized, and what did you want to say about masculinity in your work?

I play with stereotypes, I laugh at the characters and their evolutions, I have fun creating situations. For example, when XM2 disappears, the scientific brothers create XM3 to suit the other brother: he’s blond, muscular and hairless. XM2 meets him and falls in love with him. Incest has often been present in my work. In this piece, incest occurs between two robots from the same series. This second robot is only interesting to me because of the physical love that XM2 professes to him. XM2 becomes humanized to the point of being able to fall in love. Everything becomes ambiguous, a general elimination of stereotypes and clichés, creating characters that break away from pre-established roles.

I know that over the years you have drawn a lot of anti-war material. Are you active in political causes these days?

My husband and I always went to protest demonstrations. Against the Iraq war or in favor of the Palestinian or Saharawi people. I have attended gay pride demonstrations every year and I go to all the events in support of immigrants so that they can all be legalized. A Palestinian flag always flies in my window facing the Plaça Real. Whenever I have been asked, I have participated with my drawings in campaigns against AIDS, in favor of HIV-positive people or to raise funds for causes that have seemed fair to me. I have given Spanish classes to immigrants for months and for four years, after the death of my husband, I brought food down every day to three disabled alcoholic friends who spent the day in wheelchairs in the square. I narrated my relations with them in the book Chronicles of the Great Tyrant that will be published by Anagrama in March. They have published a couple of autobiographical books of mine, one The Daily Life of the Underground Cartoonist, about the ‘70s and ‘80s, and another called The Little House of the Piranhas, about my life since I started working as a teacher in an adult literacy campaign and my development as a homosexual until I came to Barcelona.

When it comes to writing prose, you've been quite prolific over the past ten years. After so many years as a visual artist, what appeals to you about text?

I have been writing since I was a teenager until I started to create scripts for my comics. In fact, the first award I received as a comic artist was for best scriptwriter at a comic festival in Madrid. I have always started with a script to which I added dialogue, then invented the characters and finally the scenery. Even in my paintings there is a visual narrative that is often self-portraits in which my face has been hidden, leaving only the everyday elements that surround me: records, videos, playing cards, cigarettes, flowers or medication. When I stopped painting, I dedicated myself to writing, not to make scripts, but to portray myself. Apart from a book, Plaza Real Safari, in which I portrayed the life and characters of the Plaça Real where I live, I dedicated myself to telling my experiences, my work and my relationship with boyfriends and friends based on the detailed diaries that I have always kept throughout my life.

My editor at Anagrama suggested that I start publishing my books based on my arrival in Barcelona and my experiences until Alejandro died. Then we published Sevilla y las casitas de las pirañas, in which I portrayed my life in Seville and the book about my childhood that was published by Laertes, who had previously published the script for the third part of Anarcoma. In March Anagrama will publish another volume and I am finishing another book in which I put into the mouths of four homosexual characters the stories of the lovers I have had.

I write because I like it, because I have stories to tell and I enjoy trying to tell them in the clearest and most enjoyable way I can, not for the reader, but because I like my literary work to be like that. I have no need to create my own style, nor did I seek a specific drawing style. I only intended it to be effective. Despite liking the literary pyrotechnics of Faulkner, Joyce or Celine, I would never try to imitate them.

For the books you’ve written you’ve had to dig a lot into your past. Do you consider yourself a nostalgic person? How have you found reflecting so intensely on your life? Is there anything in your diaries which you had forgotten, or details which surprised you?

Memory is not my strong point, and I always thought when writing my diaries that a day would come when I would like to remember events that, without them, I would have forgotten. I have never been nostalgic and I have never thought that I would like to be younger or see people I loved again who disappeared. That same intention that made me write the diaries moved me to try to turn them into books. However, it would not occur to me to read any of them. By publishing the books I close a cycle that began with the diaries. As with my comics, I never tried to hide any lurid details in my books. I have always tried to be faithful to the truth and my friends and lovers have been treated with affection and tenderness, not avoiding reality even if for some it seemed impertinent.

Have you had much experience with how younger readers and artists react to your work? Do you have a sense of how your work has impacted the next generation of comics artists?

Last year, an exhibition about me and my work was held at the Autonomous University of Bellaterra here in Barcelona. It was organized by young people at the end of their studies. They discussed the motivations that had led them to do the exhibit. Young people from various countries have spoken to me to ask me for advice on my work for university projects. As for the influence my comic work may have on young people, I have not the slightest idea.

Finally, you’ve broken many taboos in your work over the years. Are there any taboos left, any sacred cows that you think need to be challenged?

Here in Spain it will always be taboo to denounce the Church and the monarchy. You can still be accused of being, for example, a communist if you denounce either. With the advance of the extreme right, old taboos are beginning to appear on topics that should not be up for discussion, such as abortion access, euthanasia or healthcare such as gender-affirming surgery. In the face of this possible regression, we must always be vigilant so that the freedoms achieved do not disappear or deteriorate.