RIP Calpurnio

 

The illustrator Calpurnio Pisón, creator of 'El Bueno de Cuttlas', dies at the age of 63

Calpurnio is considered one of the most acclaimed cartoonists in the country

 

La Vaguardia

By Antonio Lozano

12/15/2022

 

This 2022 has been confirmed as a cursed year for the world of comics and illustration with the death, this Thursday, in Valencia, at the age of 63, due to a long illness, of Eduardo Pelegrín Martínez de Pisón, better known as Calpurnio Pisón . If the name does not sound familiar to you, it is much more likely that the name of his most memorable creation does, the cowboy Cuttlas, an iconic character in Spanish comics in recent decades, whose highly original adventures and philosophical dissertations were born in the fanzine El Japo in 1983 to be later collected by mythical publications such as El Víbora and Makoki , among many others, in addition to reaching markets such as French, Japanese or Brazilian.

Compared to other cowboys with a more archetypal profile and clear lines, such as Lucky Luke or Lieutenant Blueberry, the one dubbed Good Cuttlas was just a silhouette or puppet with lines so simple that they bordered on childishness, he lived simultaneously in several eras ( Where else has a cowboy been seen to be up to date with the most advanced technology or to party in the desert with Cherokees playing electronic music?), he was prodigal in surprising dissertations on the meaning of life and the human condition. Pure existentialist minimalism covered in hilarious irony.

The enormous popularity of the character led him to make the leap to short films, commercials and a puppet play.

As the specialist in comics Álvaro Pons wrote at the time, “Calpurnio is a genius who has spent twenty years making a masterpiece with the most limited resources in the world: the closed space of a page and characters sketched in the most synthetic way possible, with some sticks”. The enormous popularity of the character led him to make the leap to short films, advertisements and a puppet play and, as happened to Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, his creator had to back down (twice!) from his wish to kill him in the face of strong opposition from his legion of fans.

Apart from his most emblematic creation, he signed books such as El Signo de los Tiempos, Mundo Plasma or the highly praised illustrations for the remastered version of the Odyssey published by the Blackie Books label in 2022.

Pisón began his professional career in the infographics department of the newspaper El Heraldo de Aragón , a stage that he declared had nourished him with the necessary muscle to work under pressure, which allowed him to chain journalistic media to which he would nourish with his illustrations - El País (1995- 2001), 20 minutos (2004-2015) and recently Plaza magazine -, work that he combined with scripts and drawings for animated films, as well as numerous promotional and advertising graphic works.

In 1997, the versatile artist opened a new creative window working as a video jockey under the pseudonym ERROR video, thus producing highly abstract video creations that took him to various electronic music festivals and to collaborate with musicians such as Mad Professor or the electronic rock group Neotokyo. Among the cascade of awards he received throughout his career were the Revelation Author Award from the Saló del Còmic de Barcelona in 1993, the Ciutat de Palma Comic Award in 2016, the Aragonese Comic Award 2016 in recognition of an entire career and the 2018 Huelva International Comic Fair Award.

His last job was the creation of the poster for the new edition of the Zaragoza Comic Fair, which is held this December.

His latest work was the creation of the poster for the new edition of the Zaragoza Comic Fair, which will be held between December 16 and 18 and which will be the first opportunity to posthumously pay homage to one of the greats of illustration and art. Spanish comic of the last half century.

The artist from Zaragoza has died at the age of 63 as a result of a long illness. The artist from Zaragoza was a renowned cartoonist, screenwriter, animator and video jockey, whose best-known work is the El Bueno de Cuttlas comics, where he narrated the exploits of a cowboy from a minimalist style with simple lines. 

Calpurnio (Eduardo Pelegrín Martínez de Pisón)

Born: 1959, Zaragoza, Aragon, Spain

Died: 12/15/2022, Valencia, Valencia, Spain

 

Calpurnio’s westerns – illustrator, animator, animation director:

The Good Cutlas – 1990 [animator]

Atolladero – 1995 [animation director]

The Man of the West – 1999 [illustrator]

The Molecular Gunslinger – 2000 [illustrator]

The Samurai Cowboy - 2014