Girl Awakes: Las Cosas Que Te Pasan...

A couple of weeks ago an Argentine friend invited me to a film premiere at MALBA, the museum of Latin American art in Buenos Aires. The premiere was for a documentary about an Argentine comic strip artist, Ricardo Siri, better known as Liniers, who has a comic strip called "Macanudo" in La Nacion, one of the daily newspapers here. My friend, Emiliano, is a big fan, and offered to pay for my ticket, so even though I had never heard of this "pibe,"* I accepted.

The documentary was excellent. Liniers, a laid-back, t-shirt-wearing, bespectacled man with an easy laugh and humble aversion to the spotlight, proved to be an incredibly accessible and endearing subject. Liniers' story was told through a mixture of footage of him in action: sketching in the park, at his desk in his apartment/studio, etc., interspersed with revelatory animated cartoons, and voice over narration by the director, an Argentine filmmaker named Franca Gonzalez, who had first gotten to know Liniers while sharing an apartment in Montreal with him as part of an artists' residency.

Sense of humor, and thus cartoons and comics, is very personal; I didn't expect to be taken in by "Macanudo," Liniers' main project. But within minutes, I was "enganchada," --hooked-- on the poignant themes, simply expressed through recurring characters: penguins, gnomes, a small girl and her teddy bear, and Liniers himself, in rabbit form, representing everyday sentiments both revelatory and familiar. I left the theater and spent the bus ride home devouring the book of Macanudo that had been included with the ticket purchase.

The documentary mentioned that a book of his work had come out translated into French, so I looked around a bit to see if it exists in English, but I couldn't find it, and, to be honest, it's probably better that way. In addition to the ingenious way Liniers expresses familiar, everyday ponderings and universal internal conflicts through his drawings, the words and expressions he chooses are Argentine, and this in and of itself is appealing to me.

Spending a good amount of time in the city for the first time on my trip, I've been exposed so much more to Argentine--and specifically, Portenio or Buenos Aires--language, and have become fascinated with its rhythm, tone, slang, and, importantly, accompanying gestures and body language. Liniers captures Argentine speech so well that I can clearly hear and see his anthropomorphic creatures speaking those words in the speech bubbles above their heads. Not only that, but often, the humor targets neuroses or cultural characteristics that are Argentine specific. For this reason, I'm not sure I would have fallen so hard for Macanudo had it been introduced to me six months ago. It's only after being here for eight and a half (!) months that I've gotten under the skin of the country enough to recognize and appreciate its "Argentinidad."

In the documentary and in person, Liniers comes off as humble to the point of shyness--in one scene, he meets up with Franca in a cafe to turn down the documentary project Obviously, he later changed his mind, but the focus is kept to his professional life, with his wife and daughter, who was born during the course of the filming, are only mentioned, but never appear. However, his cartoons are incredibly revelatory and personal. Some give voice to familiar moral dilemmas and inner struggles in such a way that make it clear that Liniers is sharing anecdotes inspired by his own life. Others are like scribbled sighs, transforming the banal into something delightful. In this way, this private man indirectly, but consciously, exposes his heart and soul to the Argentine public every day through Macanudo.