Spain Rodriguez

Manuel Rodriguez (b. 1940), better known as Spain or Spain Rodriguez, is an American underground cartoonist who created the character Trashman. His experiences on the road with the biker gang, the Road Vultures, provided inspiration for his work, as did his left-wing politics.

Biography

Born in Buffalo, New York, Rodriguez studied at the Silvermine Guild Art School. In New York City, during the late 1960s, he became a contributor to the East Village Other, which published his own comics tabloid, Zodiac Mindwarp (1968).

A founder of the United Cartoon Workers of America, he contributed to numerous underground comics and also drew Salon's continuing graphic story, The Dark Hotel.

Strongly influenced by 1950s EC comic book illustrator Wally Wood, Spain pushed Wood's sharp, crisp black shadows and hard-edged black outlines into a more simplified, stylized direction. His work also extended the eroticism of Wood's female characters. In such classics as Mean Bitch Thrills, Spain’s ladies were raunchy, explicitly sexual and sometimes incorporated macho sadomasochistic themes.^[1]

His more recent work is an illustrated biography of Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Che: A Graphic Biography (2009). Published in several different languages, it was described by comics artist Art Spiegelman as "brilliant and radical."^[2]

Bibliography

• She: Anthology of Big Bitch (with Susie Bright). San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1993.
• My True Story. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 1994.
• Nothing in This Book Is True, But It's Exactly How Things Are, text by Bob Frissell. Berkeley: Frog Ltd., 1994.
• Alien Apocalypse 2006 (with Kathy Glass and Harold S. Robbins). Berkeley: Frog Ltd., 2000.
• Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2003. ISBN 1-56097-511-3
• You Are a Spiritual Being Having a Human Experience, text by Bob Frissell. Berkeley: Frog Ltd., 2003.
• Che: A Graphic Biography, edited by Paul Buhle. London/New York: Verso, 2008.

References

1. ^ http://www.diesirae911.com/spain.html Short discussion of Wood's influence on Spain
2. ^ Bennett, Jessica. "Road Vultures back in town for Comicon", The Spectrum, October 21 2009.

External links

• Spain video by Revel
• The Dark Hotel
• Graphic Classics
• On Spain
• Lambiek: Spain
• Road Vultures and Rumbles
• Che: A Graphic Biography by Spain Rodriguez
• Jon Ascher interview with Spain (1998)

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Name	Rodriguez, Spain
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Date of birth	1940
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