Spanish artist Marti’s Chester Gould-inspired hardboiled eurocomic, “The Cabbie”, which we got in one album from Catalan Communications back in 1987, is the sort of comic that I never thought we’d see a continuation of in English. But it seems if you wait long enough, anything can happen in the American comic book industry. And next year, on July 5th, Fantagraphics will publish book one of the complete comic book series, “The Cabbie”, by Marti Riera, 64 pages in July. So come along for a wild ride in July.
from http://www.infibeam.com/Books/cabbie-book-one-marti/9781606994504.html
The Cabbie: Book One Book Description
Marti has contributed to The Cabbie: Book One as an author. Born in 1955, “Marti” has been published in the anthologies “RAW, Drawn and Quarterly”, and “Pictopia”; an issue of his solo comic “Calvario Hills”, which appeared under the “Ignatz” imprint from Fantagraphics in 2007, revived the Cabbie for a new adventure.
Art Spiegelman has contributed to The Cabbie: Book One as a content introducer. The Pulitzer prize winning author of “Maus” and “Maus II”, Art Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and grew up in Rego Park, New York. He is also the co-founder/editor of RAW, the acclaimed magazine of avant-garde comix and graphics and the illustrator of the lost classic “The Wild Party” by Joseph Moncure March. Spiegelman’s work has been published in more than sixteen languages and has appeared in “The New York Times, Village Voice, ” and “Playboy”, among others. He has been a contributing editor and cover artist for “The New Yorker” since 1992.
My first ride with Marti was with this graphic album from Catalan Communications back in 1987:
from http://www.comicsreview.co.uk/nowreadthis/category/european-classics/page/5/
Dick Tracy is one of the most well-known strips in the world and his contributions to the art form are many and indisputable. They occurred over many decades and the medium of graphic narrative grew up with it. Imagine the effect instant exposure – almost over exposure – to such an uncompromising, bombastic, iconic property on the artists of a nation where free-expression and creative autonomy was suppressed for generations.
That’s what happened when the death of General Franco (who held Spain in a fascistic time-warp from his victory in October 1936 until his death in November 1975) instantly opened-up and liberalized all aspects of Spanish life. As Art Spiegelman says in his introduction ‘decades of political and social repression gave way to a glorious eruption of creativity that allowed a full-fledged counterculture to come to life at just about the same time that America’s “Love Generation” gave way to what Tom Wolfe labeled the “Me Generation.”’
How odd yet fitting then that an American symbol of “the Establishment” so enchanted and captivated the young cartoonist Marti Riera that he assimilated every line and nuance to create this dark and angry homage concerning the tribulations of a seedy, desperate taxi-driver trapped in a vanished past and prey to a world at once free and dangerous, ungoverned and chaotic.