Walter Ciocca was an Argentine architect and cartoonist. Theoretician Oscar Masotta defined him as the “best exponent of folklore comics”. His work is not only one of the most representative within the gaucho genre, but also of all Argentine comics.
Summary
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- 1 Biographical summary
- 1Trayectoria
- 2 Cartoonist career
- 3Vida personal
- 2 Obras
- 3 Characteristics of his work
- 4Fuente
biographical synthesis
He was born in Argentina , ( Buenos Aires , 1907 – 1984 ) since his birth he was marked by art. His sister was a professor of Fine Arts, while his father manufactured and designed footwear – he was awarded at the “World’s Columbian Exposition” ( New York ) in 1892 -. He graduated as an architect.
Trajectory
His first works had to do with the architectural planning of the renovation of the city of Buenos Aires between 1932 and 1935 .
He worked for twenty-seven years in the Department of Architecture and Urbanism of the Municipality of Buenos Aires as a designer in the planning of Avenida 9 de Julio, forming part of the team led by the urban planner Carlos M. della Paolera. He always took his pad to make sketches, and he admired André Galant, an artist who made sketches from life and collaborated in the French magazine L̉ Ilustration. The Crítica newspaper published many of the sketches Ciocca took from boxing matches held at Luna Park.
cartoonist career
In 1948 he began his career as a cartoonist adapting An Excursion to the Ranquel Indians, by Lucio V. Mansilla. He then continued with Eduardo Gutiérrez and that is how Juan Cuello, Santos Vega, A friendship until death and Black Ant emerged. The latter, which appeared on February 3, 1950 in the newspaper La Razón, was a complete success. He is faced with a fighting gaucho – as is usual in Gutiérrez’s novels – who finally redeemed himself and returned to being a good man.
The writer was inspired by Guillermo Hoyos, who was born in San Nicolás de los Arroyos (Province of Buenos Aires), and lived between ca.1837-1918. Ciocca’s graphics are fresh and spontaneous, as if he were drawing from sketches obtained in the same place where the action takes place.
Personal life
Little by little, he gives up city life and enters the Pampas plains to become a complete, solitary and nomadic gaucho, who travels through both the forts and the border towns. At first he has a girlfriend, Viviana, who is killed by a Unitarian’s servant, and finally a woman, Ana Rosa, who is captured by the Indians until she goes mad and dies. However, Lindor Covas was considered by his readers as a guy who was not very fond of feminine charms, and Roberto Fontanarrosa, a fan of this comic and its creator, played a joke on him through his character Inodoro Pereyra.
Construction
Hilario Leiva, the rebel, from 1953 , published in La Razón, was his first work with its own plot, another gaucho cartoon in which the germ of Lindor Covas, the maroon, lay beneath.
Between 1953 and 1958 he drew Fuerte Argentino for Misterix magazine, with a script by Julio Almada (pseudonym for Julio Aníbal Portas, a notable connoisseur of country customs). It is a Fortinera cartoon that described the daily routine and the typical protagonists of that area. Captain Mariano Flores -who participated in the Paraguayan War- was a shrewd hero, brave, skillful with weapons and an excellent horseman. A feature of Ciocca’s style stands out here: the use of full black, which Fernando García and Hernán Ostuni described as “drawing with strong lines, almost xylographic”. I continue drawing Juan Arancio.
His consecrating work as a scriptwriter and cartoonist was Lindor Covas, el marron, which was published as a daily strip in La Razón from November 10, 1954, Day of Tradition. The cartoonist affirmed that: “Possibly I was not telling the truth in something, but Lindor does not resemble the bad gauchos of Gutiérrez, nor the brave gaucho of Hernández (…) He is, between parentheses and keeping his distance, a Quixote (…) The world in which Lindor moves is the Argentina that goes from 1845 to 1865 more or less”, and thus includes the time in which Juan Manuel de RosasHe was Governor of the Province of Buenos Aires and main leader of the so-called Argentine Confederation. The protagonist, against the federal ideas of his family, adhered to the cause of the Unitarians, but upon learning that they wanted to ally themselves with France , he abandoned them as he considered them traitors.
Lindor Covas, el marron lasted twenty-six years with a total of eight thousand daily strips, and stopped coming out in January 1981 . It circulated in many provincial newspapers and in Uruguay . It was republished from August 1959 in the magazine Fist Extra Strong. In 1963 Carlos Cores took her to the cinema as director and performer.
Characteristics of his work
- In the nocturnal adventures, the artist once again employs that graphic wisdom that characterizes him through solid blacks (there are silhouettes of carriages, characters and horsemen) and the use of multiple stripes, both for objects and for people.
- The rusticity of its strokes gives vigor and toughness to the strip, as well as a tragic aura, full of betrayals and violence.
- A great capacity for observation and contact with documents allowed him to capture the spaces in which history unfolded.
- Few explanatory texts are seen since his script was based more on the dialogues, which reproduced the speech of that time, a merit that demanded an enormous effort on the part of Ciocca.
- The visual language of the cartoon is admirable since it generates constant changes of planes and, likewise, the drawing of horses, the movements of the characters and the hand-to-hand fights are resolved with plasticity.