His description of Guatemala and the US’s brutal foreign policy towards it will stick with me forever and he brilliantly depicts how the whole world held its breath during the Cuban missile crisis. Some of the strongest sections are where Rodriguez pulls back from the events swirling directly around Che and portrays the wider picture of international events. Though Rodriguez’s admiration for the man is clear throughout, he doesn’t shy away from some of Che’s less admirable moments like executing his enemies, extramarital affairs, his willingness to go down in a blaze of nuclear glory and impatience with the revolutionaries in Congo. This is when Che became the stubborn, hardened, disciplined, informal and efficient revolutionary and his messiah-like appearance came into being. We see too how Che was introduced to Raul and Fidel Castro and became involved in their July 26 Movement, how they sailed across the Caribbean in the rickety yacht Granma and embarked on the revolution which achieved success after a calamitous beginning. We see how his motorcycle journey with his pal Alberto was the beginning of a class consciousness and where, after witnessing the treatment of the working class and the horrific oppression of the native peoples of South America thrust upon them by the heady mix of capitalism and neocolonialism, his politics began to solidify around socialism. The book whips us through the main events in his life. Yet the Argentinian Marxist revolutionary cannot be anything other than an utterly fascinating subject and it wasn’t long before the times, travels, friendships, loves, trials and tribulations of Che’s extraordinary life had me hooked and I eventually grew to appreciate Rodriguez’s simple yet fluid storytelling. Where cartoon artists such as Joe Sacco, Darryl Cunningham and Kate Evans surprise by altering perspectives, inverting colours, swirling dialogue across the page or chopping up the panels, Rodriguez more or less sticks to the same six or seven panels per page throughout.Ĭonsidering the length of Spain Rodriguez’s career - he began back in the 1960s by drawing subversive cartoons for underground publications - it’s understandable that he might take a more traditional approach to the new-school cartoonists. Initially, I was disappointed by what appears to be outdated artwork and unimaginative layout. I cluelessly sported the T-shirt in my teens and vaguely remember the plots of the films The Motorcycle Diaries and Steven Soderbergh’s biopics and I was only too eager to rid myself of embarrassing gaps in my knowledge and delve right into Spain Rodriguez’s representation of the life of El Che. MUCH like the US guy at the beginning of this graphic biography, my knowledge of Ernesto “Che” Guevara was sketchy at best.
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