El Víbora magazine (1979-2004) perfectly embodied the cultural syncretism that was experienced in Barcelona at the beginning of democracy. Its pages hosted a part of the authors who had initiated the underground culture in the seventies, a cultural and artistic phenomenon especially linked to the city.
Through magazines, documents and original drawings of comics and other pieces, the exhibition introduces the underground comix in the international and Barcelona context, which was the substrate on which the magazine was born. Nearly 100 printed covers, some 30 publications and 35 original pieces are on display, such as Max and Isa Feu's drawings for the historic special issue on the 1981 coup d'état or the original by Nazario for the cover ofthe first issue of the magazine.
Comic at the Museu Nacional
This exhibition is part of the strategy of the museum, which works to incorporate comics into its collections and show the relationships that can be established between all the arts.
El Víbora, Comix contracultural is another step in this line of work and the continuity of some previous events, such as the exhibition of originals by Santiago García and Javier Olivares, National Prize of Comic 2015, From vignette in vignette (De viñeta en viñeta) and Ego Sum Lux Comic, with the Joso school, or the one dedicated to The New Adventures of Corto Maltés, at the same time that it reinforces the alliance of the museum with the Comic Fair (Salón del Cómic) and the joint work of dissemination and patrimonialization of this artistic expression.
The National Museum has also promoted the publication of the first comic book about a museum, Gótico, by Jorge Carrión and Sagar and dedicated to medieval collections, which was published in 2018 and will continue until the different collections are completed.
The incorporation of the comic to the tales and projects of the museum, as a more visual language and expression of popular culture, allows us to reflect certain historical-artistic contexts and connect them with our present. The project is also part of the framework that the museum develops to extend its collection and scope of action to postwar art and the second avant-garde.
In this context, the museum has recently incorporated a large-format (280 cm x 2400 cm) and historical-artistic value piece thanks to a donation. This is the comic book Love in Vallvidrera made in 1980 collectively by a significant number of artists linked to El Víbora.
On the occasion of the 13th birthday of the EINA design school, in 1980 a "live comic" was held in the avant-garde Gallery 13 of Barcelona. A series of authors were selected among the main protagonists of the underground scene, some of whom were already working for El Víbora. The spirit of the magazine, loaded with what today is called "political incorrectness”, runs through this collective and performative work where the society of the time is criticized, from conservative sectors to progressivism. The piece also offers testimony of the links between the authors of the Barcelona underground scene and some of the drivers of the Madrid movement.
After all these years out of public view, A Love in Vallvidrera has entered the collections of the National Museum and is currently in the process of being restored for its next exhibition.
40th Anniversary
The first issue of the Barcelona magazine El Víbora appeared in the news stands in December 1979. The subtitle, "comix for survivors”, made its content clear. Comix were the countercultural and alternative comics, generated in the United States in the 1960s. It was a social and cultural phenomenon that broke the mold of the commercial comics, censorship-free stories that talked about everyday issues (of drugs and sex, yes, but also of day to day) or metaphysical, with satire as their identity, very customized graphics and restricted distribution.
The origin of El Víbora was in the underground comix (that is, clandestine and provocative) that flourished in Barcelona in the seventies, in the wake of the American countercultural comic. Between 1973 and 1978 there were many young creators who wanted to immerse themselves in those liberating cartoons, concentrating on the subversive parody and the satire of customs. The counterculture had forged a new way of creating culture.
El Víbora was a redemption that culminated the underground movement and, at the same time, closed it turning it into a mass phenomenon. It was also evidence that Spain was changing and wanted to open the doors widely to a free society. The market for comic books had just started and El Víbora came to fill a gap. A magazine of restless authors who talked about what they saw on the street. And the street responded positively.
El Víbora was made possible thanks to the funding and logistical support that the Catalan publisher Josep Toutain offered to Josep Maria Berenguer, who would become the editor of the new title, founding Ediciones La Cúpula. In this magazine, creators of very personal and diverse languages collaborated, such as Calonge, Carratalá, Carulla, Ceesepe, Das Pastoras, Mauro Entrialgo, Isa Feu, Gallardo, Laura, Mariscal, Marta, Martí, Jaime Martín, Miguel Ángel Martín, Max, Mediavilla , Montesol, Nazario, Pamies, Pons or Roger, among many others.
At the beginning of the nineties the society had changed and the magazine progressively parked its more underground perspective to assume contents closer to the new alternative comic strip. However, some of its usual collaborators remained and new figures appeared, such as Álvarez Rabo, Boldú, María Colino, Diego, Galiano, Ana Juan, Pilar, Javi Rodríguez, Tomeu Seguí or Sequeiros. On the other hand, El Víbora also published a selection of the best international comics, signed by the likes of Robert Crumb, the Hernández brothers, Peter Bagge, Daniel Clowes, Pétillon, Tardi, Swarte, Muñoz and Sampayo, Jamie Hewlett, Yoshiriho Tatsumi or Jiro Taniguchi.
El Víbora survived 300 issues until December 2004.
The comix undeground
The comix undeground arises in the United States as a response to the social convulsions of the moment and to an industry dominated by the genre of superheroes and aimed at adolescents. It is part of the counterculture defined by Theodore Roszak in 1968 and finds its first forms of expression in university journals and self-publishings by the authors.
It is the response of a young generation of cartoonists who with their breakthrough graphics want to tell their own stories without restrictions or censorship. They reflect critically on society, with references to drug use, the rejection of sexual taboos, ecological denouncing or feminist demands. The Comix defines a new way of understanding comics; underground evidences its clandestine distribution, since these publications did not go through the censorship filter of the Comics Code implemented by the industry.
In 1973, the first Spanish underground comix, El Rrollo Enmascarado, was published in Barcelona. The initiative had its continuity in various comics, many of them grouped under the label of Los Tebeos del Rrollo and published between 1974 and 1976. A fixed group of authors was quickly established in Barcelona, with the basic presence of: Guillem Cifré, Farry (Miquel Farriol), Isa, Laura, Marshal, Marti, Max, Mediavilla, Montesol, Nazario, Onliyú, Pamies, Pepichek (Josep Farriol), Roger, Rubiales or Vallés, who would soon be joined by Gallardo, Mediavilla and Pons.
Jaume Fargas, who imported North American underground comix into Spain through the Dutch publisher Real Free Press , joined these names and in 1974 founded the Zap 275 bookstore in Barcelona. The Barcelonan imprint did not take long to obtain a response in the rest of Spain, being one of the generators of the movida madrileña.
Power and subversion
The comic strips of El Víbora fought in their own way against established order and power, be it political, economic or cultural. They renewed the panorama of comics in Spain and returned this means of communication to one of its infinite proposals: that of critically reflecting society. Many of its characters are libertarians, transvestites, gays, drug addicts, radicals or ecologists and represent, in essence, the social marginalization of the time.
Eros and feminism
El Víbora provided a vision of free and uninhibited sex, which shattered old frustrations; a sexuality linked to the everyday with touches, sometimes, of black series. It also had a very playful (and lustful) treatment, even parodic, always transgressive. And although in a minoritary way, feminist demands appeared, made basically by the authors.
Urban life
The comic strips of El Víbora are eminently urban, they have the city as the main stage, with special emphasis on the alleys of the underworld, such as Barcelona's Chinatown. The majority of its authors were street people, people of very different social origins who, among other things, had in common the ability to interpret the pulse of the big cities. Sometimes, with a clear critical tone, at other times more concentrated in the ludic part or as a reflection of the new postmodern vanguard.
