T he cartoons of Memento Méndez conspire in a Pirandellian way and in the style of Unamuno de Niebla, but without conflicts, with the clarity of the elective affinities of those who contemplate themselves in the mirror of their own work. This is the approach of the comic recreation of an exciting scene from Llámame Méndez (2017), the prequel in which Victoria González Torralba brought together writer and character in the Biblioteca de Catalunya at the end of the forties. In said novel, a young Ricardo Méndez recently joined the police stopped by the Central Library as a result of an investigation and sympathized there with another young man to whom he gave a title for what he was writing. The author would pay that debt many years later, by bringing that disenchanted boy to life on paper.
Why raise the scene in a comic? In the case of González Ledesma, it was almost obligatory: comics scriptwriter for the Bruguera publishing house, novelist of all genres in the kiosk, journalist and committed narrator, with musical and clear prose, winner of the Planeta prize in 1984 with Sentimental Chronicle in Red, the Barcelonan He was an avant-garde author.
This is how we understood it with Biblioteques de Barcelona in the González Ledesma File, the exhibition that opened the BCNegra 2022 at the Jaume Fuster library. Avant-garde for being one of the first to combine popular culture and serious literature without complexes, the kiosks of the 20th century with the library of all time. His literary DNA combined critical humor and the most committed lyricism, since there are elegies that are a duty to memory. And also as a journalist he was from La Vanguardia, since he joined this newspaper in 1971. In both facets he brought light to the shadows of the present, he committed himself to the memory of yesterday that best explains us and gave a voice to those who had always obtained the quiet for answer.
At barely 27 years old, the author had spent hours at the Biblioteca de Catalunya to write Sombras viejas. His first novel spoke of Barcelona before the war, and in 1948 he won the International Prize created by Josep Janés, but it would not be published as censorship was described as "red" and "pornographer" to the author, a frankly exaggerated opinion. . In any case, in the midst of the dictatorship it had been naive to try to publish the novel of a republican Barcelona with political parties and rallies.
That young man had a bad time. And Silver Kane was born one of the nights that followed, when his uncle Rafael González signed him for the Bruguera publishing house. It was sad not to sign his name – he told it much later, in his memoirs, Historia de mis calles (2006) – but at least he wrote, what the hell!, and he did it on that big paper screen where the public read to him controlling. Over four decades, Silver Kane wrote a thousand newsstand novels and the scripts for hundreds of comic book episodes. He acted as a masked writer, a quixotic righter of wrongs, with his old red typewriter, that pocket Ferrari that put stories of all genres at the service of the same prose that would later wear his name.
We wanted to honor this in the exhibition, for which we toured the streets of the Méndez Territory with the photographer Liubov Kavelich and the chronicler of events Joaquim Roglan in the skin of the inspector. He was not only a good friend and admirer of González Ledesma. Roglan shares the look with Méndez, that critical disenchantment of old-school reporters, those who talk to people no one else speaks to, those who wear out the soles of their shoes in the street like old bloodhounds, those who enter in contact with people who are not recommended, skeptics and disbelievers, only apparently cynical due to the political incorrectness of their lucid, sharp, lacerating comments.
The old journalists observe the world with the same gaze of an old snake that the author attributes to Méndez, laden with scales, a sum of experience and the fight against oblivion. Kavelich's photos were a starting point for his recreation in the vignettes of the present (the first page of the five that follow), and the character's passage through the library patio triggers the reminiscing flashback that connects him to his youth. .
The cartoonist is Josemaría Casanovas, son of José María Casanovas, another great from La Bruguera. Our Casanovas works as a cover designer for Marvel and at the moment he draws La filla del mar de Guimerà in Serra d'Or magazine. Like the screenwriter, he is a member of the baby boom, whose imagination owes so much to that generation.
