Lalo Alcarazat Gustavo Arellano's
Interview/Live Talk Show
Fullerton Public Library
Tonight, Sept. 29; 6:30 PM
Editor's Note: Ana Merino did this interview with Lalo Alcaraz, the creator, artist, and writer for the comic strip La Cucaracha. Mr. Alcaraz is Gustavo Arellano's guest at the Fullerton Public Library tonight as a new season of Arellano's lecture/live talk show series starts. The presentation starts at 6:30 PM
ALCARAZ: Between that, college and in '92 starting at the L.A. Weekly, I did the zine. I did Pocho Magazine with my homeboy Esteban Zul, and we had this kind of rasquache aesthetic where we would just slap it together. As long as the content, the writing was good, that's what was important. Visually, it looked cool, too, because it had that kind of rough, punk-rock-looking aesthetic. That was on purpose too, but it helped, to kind of just get it done fast.
When I started at the L.A. Weekly, I was so overwhelmed by trying to do a nice job on the drawings that I started doing really elaborate renderings... the schedule was different, it was one a week, so I had more time, and then I didn't even... I didn't have another job, I didn't have a job. [Laughs.] I was also doing comedy, so I had money from that...
MERINO: You were doing stand-up?
ALCARAZ: I was doing sketch comedy.
MERINO: Sketch comedy, what is that?
ALCARAZ: That's with a group, you do skits.
MERINO: OK, good.
ALCARAZ: Hopefully. [Laughs.] It was the Chicano Secret Service, a comedy group. That's why I still have those shirts; that was my design. I had more time, and so I would do these big, elaborate editorial cartoons with a lot of crosshatching and a lot of panels. It was weekly, kind of alternative-weekly style. But that was when, like I said, I had more time. As my stuff got more popular, and I started doing two cartoons a week, and then I started doing more editorial cartoons a week, then I kind of sped it back up again and started to get more doodle-y and kind of rough style. And now that I do the daily strip, I'm battling that kind of tight, tight style, because the volume is so much. I have to crank them out in a two, three-day period. I had to speed up my process.
MERINO: What size do you draw the strip?
ALCARAZ: This is 9" X 12".
MERINO: Do you first use blue pen?
ALCARAZ: Lápiz.
MERINO: A lápiz, a blue pencil. And first you draw that, and after that you ink, and you erase?
ALCARAZ: Yes.
MERINO: Did you use that way before, or this is something that you learned?
ALCARAZ: I think I picked that up in college, although I did a lot of just straight-ink kind of drawings, you know. I couldn't tell you who taught me that, I think I must have seen it somewhere -- oh, maybe it was actually when I was in environmental design. That's how we worked with drawings, with a non-reproducing pencil... and then you lay your ink over it for your technical drawings, your drafting.
MERINO: Your inking is more like an architect's, because you are using the inking pens that architects use more than the regular comics artists; they have this bottle of ink and they brush...
ALCARAZ: Oh, yeah. I'm a slob, too, so I gave up -- I tried the ink and brush...
MERINO: You came from the architect tradition. They use these type of pens sometimes. I've seen architects working.
ALCARAZ: Yeah, I have the technical pens, definitely. I'm comfortable with that. See, I didn't have to draw, bring my straight-edge, my drafting table, because I can draw straight lines and right angles and divide spaces up really easily.
MERINO: It looks really good, what I'm seeing.
ALCARAZ: I do it just by eye.
MERINO: I'm surprised at the way you can manage with lines.
ALCARAZ: Yeah, that makes two of us. [Laughs.]
MERINO: How do you work on the strip itself? Are you taking notes and thinking, "Well, what is going to be in this panel, this is going to be in the next panel?" Do you have a notebook where you take notes and write a script?
ALCARAZ: I rough out the idea, and I sketch it out. I usually have to send it to my editor Greg Melvin in Kansas City for the daily strip. I work out the gags and everything. Basically I'm just writing the word bubbles, and work out the gag, and then kind of visualize it on the way. That's all I have to send to my editor, and then he tells me, "Oh, that sounds good," or "That's not funny," or "What the hell is a cholo?"
MERINO: How did working for a syndicate change the way you work?
ALCARAZ: When I first started drawing my weekly cartoons -- this is before the Internet -- I would have to go to Office Depot and Xerox the cartoons down to a size where I could fax them in. And even before fax machines, I would drive the originals to Hollywood to the newspaper. I lived in East L.A., and I would drive to Hollywood on Tuesday nights. It was really crazy.
MERINO: Do they keep the originals?
ALCARAZ: No no no no no, no no. I have everything. I never let them go, I have them all. I still don't really have an editor at the L.A. Weekly, and so back then, it was like whatever I turned in was pretty much fine. I had nobody telling me... You know, I'd send it to the layout guy, or I'd go straight to the art department and they'd just lay it out. That's different from working with an editor, who is there... his job is not to censor me, you know, he doesn't do that.
MERINO: He's there to tell you if it's funny or not.
ALCARAZ: Yeah, is it funny, is it misspelled, is it grammatically incorrect, does it make sense for the character to say that? He's familiar with every strip I've done and what the characters are like. We launched the daily in November of 2002, so since then I've worked with him every work day, pretty much. I talk to him all the time.
MERINO: It's a very stressful life, isn't it?
ALCARAZ: It's all right. I'm well-suited for this job. I'm prolific. I can crank out the comics, you know, I can crank out the work, my production level is never low. I've never really had writer's block. I procrastinate, like any other cartoonist, you know, but I can whip them out. And that's a very important thing, a quality they're looking for in submissions, they want to see if you can...
MERINO: ...cope with the pressure.
ALCARAZ: Yeah, punish yourself, you're happy with just putting that pressure on yourself to pump it out all the time.
MERINO: You're thinking twice...
ALCARAZ: For years, for the rest of my life, hopefully.
La Cucaracha
MERINO: Now, let's go to La Cucaracha. Can you talk about how these characters come to life? When did you decide, "I want to do this Cucaracha?"
ALCARAZ: I think about 1998, I looked at my bank account, and said, "Oh, my God. I can't afford to keep doing comics, editorial comics." I wasn't working for a paper, I was not on staff for anything, so this was my day job, you know, doing freelance, self-syndicated editorial cartoons. At first, I got the editorial cartoons syndicated through Universal. Then I realized that I always wanted to do a daily strip, like Doonesbury. Garry Trudeau is a big influence; that's the stuff I read when I was a kid, and it was fascinating to me. So in '98 I created the first version of La Cucaracha, the daily strip, and it included the Cuco Rocha character, which I had had in my editorial cartoons, and which I had had in Pocho Magazine, that's where he was first born.
MERINO: As a solo character, suddenly, his family came around.
ALCARAZ: Yeah, he's like my mascot, you know.
MERINO: Yes, your alter-ego.
ALCARAZ: Yeah. And he would just comment on stuff, you know. I did create a few little characters that were like his friends and stuff, but I never really went with that. But then, when I was going to develop the strip, I didn't want to develop a bland, family-oriented, lame, generic, High-spanic strip, you know? [Laughs.] I wanted to do something that would be more my style, you know: political, in-your-face, edgy... Really bicultural, not watered down. More Chicano and not Hispanic.
MERINO: You say more Chicano and not Hispanic.
ALCARAZ: Not Hispanic. In the '70s, the Nixon administration came up with the term "Hispanic," to identify basically Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and Cubans and Puerto Ricans, the bulk of the Latinos that were here in the U.S., and so that term has kind of gone up and down, it's kind of been rejected as a generic term for Latinos. I think people like to use Latino nowadays as the generic term. Of course, my philosophy is that everyone should be specific, if they want, about where they're from, as far as Latinos are concerned. I always say I'm Chicano. You know, being a Chicano is kind of being a politicized Mexican-American, and that's where my kind of... my onda comes from. Also, Hispanic is used as more of a... you know, some of that U.S. Latino that wants to assimilate more. Or act more upper-class, even if they're not, you know. People always, the old joke goes, it's in my La Cucaracha book, they say, "What's the difference between a Chicano and a Hispanic?" And, La Cucaracha says, "Well, about 60 grand a year."
MERINO: I'm interested in how you create your characters, and how the characters appropriate different labels, because Cuco, La Cucaracha, is a Chicano activist.
ALCARAZ: Yeah. I don't even know if he's human or not yet. [Laughs.] I always say he's a Chicano that got so pissed off, he turned into La Cucaracha, you know?
MERINO: What I see about La Cucaracha is, there's a song that is very famous when everyone is totally drunk on tequila, is [sings] La Cucaracha, La Cucaracha, Ya no puede caminar [Alcaraz laughs.] But also, what I found very interesting, is that cucaracha is this kind of insect...
ALCARAZ: Yeah.
MERINO: ...that is capable of adapting to the worst conditions.
ALCARAZ: Yeah, exactly.
MERINO: And survive in the worst situations, so in a way, the Mexican and Central American immigrants, because there are a lot of Central American immigrants who are crossing the borders, do that.
ALCARAZ: Yeah, that's right. They thrive.
MERINO: We were talking about your characters, and how Cuco is your alter ego and how you start using him first as a single character in...
ALCARAZ: Did I already talk about that? Let me tell you the story. One day, I was riding in a car with some friends of mine, a curator named Rene Yáñez, and his friend, Cynthia. And they were kind of theater people, he was one of the original members of Culture Clash, actually, He's an older gentleman, the founder of Culture Clash. And we were driving to Teatro Campesino in San Juan Bautista; that's where La Cucaracha was born in my sketchbook, in the backseat in a cloud of smoke, if you know what I mean, he came to me. And I was doodling... I had been thinking about a character, La Cucaracha, and I drew this, that day, in that car, on this lonely highway, the first time I drew him he seemed alive to me, you know. After that I started to dedicate the cartoons to putting him as el maestro de ceremonias of each strip, it was like he was announcing... he would deliver the punch line, or he would make a wisecrack, aside from the punch line, or it would be La Cucaracha's guide to blah blah blah something. He became the host of the strip. I had created a few characters around him like Chato the clown, and Chonchi the wonder Chihuahua, and all these goofy characters. They were just silly, it was more like a Mad Magazine approach - mayhem, you know?
12, 13 years later, when I was developing the idea for the daily strip, I thought, "I should use this character that people know me by, and also, it's a very recognizable term, and no one else is laying claim to La Cucaracha, and doing any comics with a cucaracha in it." I thought, "He's mine, and I'm not going to throw him away and come up with something bland. That's the best bet."
Universal Press Syndicate is the most progressive of all the syndicates, and that's why they have Doonesbury and they have Boondocks. I was very happy that they finally accepted my proposal, because I knew that they understood what my strip was about. And they were all for it, they knew, they feel responsible, you know. They were like, "We need to develop a Latino strip," and they were already doing -- I didn't know at the time -- Baldo, you know the comic strip, and...
MERINO: But the thing is, Baldo is two people, working on one, it's more family-oriented...
ALCARAZ: Yeah.
MERINO: Yours is more authentic. It's not two people saying, "Eh, let's do a family-oriented Latino thing." It's you saying, "Well, listen, I'm a Chicano, I have many issues that I think this country's not confronting, here I am, and I'm going to do it through a strip." That is very risky, because you are speaking about very serious issues to a very large audience...
ALCARAZ: I think that's what Universal recognizes; they appreciate that I'm a singular artist with a singular point of view, and it's valid. I'm not the only person who thinks the way I do, and the Latino community, of course, 100 percent does not agree with me, or much less, the mainstream American community, but Universal was the first one to respect the artists. They were the first ones to give full copyright to the cartoonists. We co-own the copyright, sort of, for licensing purposes and stuff, [but otherwise] it's all mine. I believe they were the very first ones, and now that's the industry standard. There are some older strips that other, older syndicates own, because they're so old (I mean, they should be retired), the strips are so old that they've hired people, five generations removed from the original artist that... and that's just business, you know, that's not a comic strip to me, that's just business. Universal recognizes that they're a big media company, and they try to make money and reach out to Latinos and younger people, but also they have responsibility to be even-handed and try to open and make diverse opportunities happen. So that's why I'm really happy to be with them. Because they get it.
My editor is great, [Greg] Melvin. He edits The Boondocks and Baldo, and I don't have to explain anything to him, he knows exactly what my strip was about. I begged to get him as my editor, because he was already doing Boondocks, you know, and I thought, "I'm not doing [a] Latino Boondocks, I'm doing my own thing, but it's kind of in the same vein, of at least trying to tackle serious issues with satire, which is happening more and more."
Poco a poco, it's happening in comics, but you know, that's going to take a while. I had to get that rant.
Interview by Ana Merino
Ms. Merino is a writer for The Comic Journal
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