After being closed to Valencia Daniel Torres (Teresa de Cofrentes, 1958) gave him the “wind” and left his home in Barcelona to retire like a blessed monk. In the Cantabrian valley of Liébana, in a village surrounded by nature “with 14 cows and four people”. And this is how he portrays himself Creator of Roco VargasThe publication now depicts the Apocalypse on the back cover of ‘Some teachers and all truth’ (Norma), which was supposed to come out in the year of the pandemic to celebrate forty years of vocation, but came then. already 43 years old and rising as the protagonist of the outstanding exhibition featuring hundreds of original works. comics Barcelona, last year earned him a Grand Prix for an entire career.
“Actually, in ‘The Eighth Day II’ I painted myself as a monk like ‘The Name of the Rose.’ It was a hunch. I’m that old now”, laughs the author of “Picasso in the Civil War”. He says he’s plotting the apocalypse. Does everything look so bad? “No, no. Well, yes. I’ve already denounced so much moral noise and so much frustrating in ‘Future Not’. So I use my trick to escape it all and cling to Roco Vargas’ world retrofuture. same work in some of his memoirs. Apocalypse etymologically comes from ‘revelation’, what will come. And I’m talking about a future without me”.
In those memories, he reveals, Roko VargasThe heartthrob and star adventurer who owns a nightclub and writes ‘cheap’ works under the pseudonym Armando Mistral, meets a surprised young cartoonist named Daniel Torres in 1980 and asks him to adapt his latest book ‘Tritón’ into a comic. an adventure in which the character will be born in 1983 and the author has published nine adventures.
“I’ve always defended that. illustration and comics are the same language. An illustration is already a unique sketch that tells a story in itself.” There are those who track the author, whose impressive originals are displayed in the hall. The album is limited to 999 copies and includes a signed edition. There is truth behind the irony. They came out like this: I wanted to think and went into it. confession to count my sins. I asked myself: where do you come from? what did you do? Where did you put your hand, what would you like to do?”
“I’ve never worked with computers, I’m an advocate of handcraft and I’m not a techno follower at all. That’s why I came away from technology, with geeks.” But he couldn’t help hearing “this colossal bullshit” about Artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT. Same for asking for a Hemingway-style text about the potato harvest.” “What for me? It is of no use to me, either as a reader or as a creator. This is stupid. I want to create Creation is a way, not a destination -idea-. That’s what I’m talking about in ‘Some teachers and all the facts’, how you create your style through all these teachers. You don’t come out of the spontaneous generation. I don’t trust techno-heavens or those who say everything will be like this. There is something dark behind it. They won’t fix the world. I’d rather stay away from that tsunami. The only thing that saves us as a society is intelligence and curiosity that keep us alive. They cannot tell us that curiosity is useless. This is an insult to intelligence,” he said.
What sins did Daniel Torres confess? “Wonderful sins,” he says mischievously. [estudió Arquitectura, de ahí surgieron las monumentales 600 páginas de ‘La casa’, al que dedicó seis años]. In other words, he was like the black sheep of the family who wanted to devote himself to the theater. The biggest sin was to get a job from a very nice ‘hobby’ and earn a living from it.”
And he did it right away. He started in Valencia in fanzines like ‘El Gat Pelat’ and arrived in Barcelona by train in 1980 with illustrations by Claudio Cueco, “a bad-faced chicken taken straight from the American ‘underground’ by the opposing Robert Crumb”. system on a farm that I turned into a private detective… A crazy idea born out of the freshness of youth.” He came to the newsroom of ‘El Víbora’ and handed them over to director Josep Maria Berenguer. “He liked them and said he would tell me something. But when I got home at night, I got a call saying he’d post them.”
emerged from the Valencian school of the 80s. Micharmut, Miguel Calatayud or Sento, and the referent of the open line would be enlightened later ‘opium’ (1982), universe Roko Vargas (which was a ‘byproduct’ in 2021,’non-future’, with Detective Archi Cuper), “eighth day” (1992, here God listens to the devil’s stories) or children’s series dinosaur tom‘ (one thousand nine hundred and ninety-five).
He says the market has changed a lot since its inception. “There were very few publishers in the ’80s, and we were few. And today more and more are published in shorter and shorter circulations, but readers are not growing at the same rate as titles,” he complains.
“Forcedly self-taught, because there was nowhere to read comics”, from childhood classic American masters, especially Milton Caniff (“Terry and the Pirates”) but also Flash Gordon, Little Nemo or ‘Crazy cat’. Already as a professional, he approached the “elected from the European school”. Hugo Pratt, Dino Battaglia and Jacobs“, not forgetting mobius.
keep it up Roco Vargas
Keep reading today’s classics and revamped classics like e.l Corto Maltese De Pratt was played by Juan Díaz Canales and Rubén Pellejero. “I don’t mind if someone gives Roco Vargas a second life while I’m gone,” he says.
He loves mirror games, as shown on the cover of ‘Picasso in the Civil War’ or ‘Some Masters and the Whole Truth’. What does Daniel Torres see when he looks in the mirror? “Hundreds and hundreds of pages are full of drawings. But I haven’t lost my curiosity. When I come face to face with the mystery of the blank page, I wonder what will happen when I’ve finished drawing on that paper. To deprive you of the surprise and see what you didn’t suspect come up. I repeat: I’m interested in the road, more than the final work. That’s the essence of my work.”