by Keith J. Rainville

Today’s lucha-geek-about-town tends to discover the wonderful world of Mexican masked wrestlers in one of three ways — exotic ring action on cable TV, re-issued vintage lucha-hero movies, or via the current bombardment of lucha mask iconography interpreted by the cutting edge art community. Ironically, none of these routes to enmascarado fandom reflects what was easily the most prolific body of media in the entire idiom — comic books.

Comics, particularly those starring EL SANTO, pioneered much of the gospel of the Mexi-lucha-hero notion. They came first, they had the vision, they set the bar that movie studios tried to clear but often failed. The hugely successful comics were the first multi-media frontier conquered by masked wrestlers, and who knows if the film genre would even exist without them.

But alas, various factors (covered below) have made dinosaur fossils more common than intact back issues, so this will be many ’s first dip in the pool of lucha-hero pulp. This rant is continued in four following pages: The Covers, FX sin limite, Confessions of a Fake Santo and Los otros.

THE SILVER MASK IN SEPIA

1952 — like the U.S. and Russia climbing over each other to get a satellite into orbit first, comic publishers and film studios raced to create the Mexi-lucha-hero in their own respective media. Films have longer production than comics, so it ’s a chicken and egg scenario here, but regardless of what dates Medico Asesino or Huracan Ramirez first hit the silver screen, Jose G. Cruz undisputedly created the first enduring lucha-hero franchise, and truly defined the genre. Six years later, when Santo finally hit movie screens, he was already a veteran crime buster in pulp.

In Santo: el enmascarado de plata the formula was set — the wrestler moonlighting as justice crusader, futuristic technology at the ready, damsels in distress and villains with vendettas. The comic book Santo was established as the go-to guy for outr é menaces like mummies and Frankensteins. But it wasn’t through ink, brush and 4-color halftone screens. It was through photos...

FOTOMONTAJE

Circa 1943, during the “epoca de oro” of the Mexican comic book industry, newspaper strip artists like Cruz refined a technique of storytelling through photos composited with painted and illustrated artwork. The idea of this ‘photo-montage’ art was to capture a sense of realism.

Models, in our case legend-in-the-making El Santo, were photographed in a variety of poses that could be adapted and re-used over and over — punching, running, falling, flying, etc. Santo probably gave the crew a day of his time, wherein they ’d shoot several dozen poses and bank them for later use. The figures were contour-cut and laid on top of backgrounds like slightly out-of-focus cityscape photos, or brush-illustrated exotic locales. Villains and women-in-peril could be collaged in at any time, as were jet packs and flying saucers, walls of flame, hungry sharks, and what have you... Speech balloons were all that was left to create a scene that would rival that of any silver screen serial, but in sepia or green-toned ink.

Little has been written about the actual process, but my guess based on my pre-Mac days in ad agencies and newspapers, would be figures, special effects and dialogue were mounted on separate acetate sheets over background boards, akin to animation cells. These elements were shot for print production, then likely pulled apart to be reused in subsequent issues.

Fotomontaje’s ‘realism’ may have intrigued the public, but the factory-like art manufacturing process had an entirely different appeal to the publishers — it was cheap and fast... Team collage assembly was much faster than single artists rendering pages, so issues could be released more often. Collage labor was less skilled than painters or cartoonists, thus paid less, and a one-time participation of a celebrity like Santo could yield years worth of stories.

Under the coordination of art directors like Jose Trinidad Romero and Horacio Robles, Cruz ’s crews became so adept at the fotomontaje process, they could knock out three issues of the book per week. Legend has it they were exploring the possibility of going daily at one point, too.

Jose G. Cruz saved additional money by writing the entire run of Santo as well. Storylines ranged from simple crime capers to outré science fiction, Universal Monsters-inspired horror, with even mythological and metaphysical menaces being no match for the silver-masked man. Religion permeated the series, with Santo consulting the Virgin of Guadalupe or descending into hell to thrown Lucifer in a headlock.

Like most contemporary pulp heroes, he was portrayed as one-dimensional. You read Santo comics for the monster fights and perilous escapes, not his home life, post-match downtime or brooding self-introspection while staring sullenly from a rooftop at night.

Unlike the films which used them to pad out their running time, wrestling matches were actually few and far between in the comics.

A MEXICAN MASS MEDIA INSTITUTION

We think very highly of our Superman’s and Spider-Man’s here in the U.S., but in straight terms of numbers of readers, neither billion-dollar property held a candle to Santo at his height. Cruz ’s collage commandos were cranking out three issues a week, and at the title’s apex, each of these issues sold over 500,000 copies! That’s over 1.5 million Santo comics sold per week, 6 million per month.

But that’s not where the readership ends. Mexican comics were read, not collected. They weren’t sealed in bags and socked away for speculation. They were passed-on to other members of the family, read by children, parent and grandparent alike. Mexican newsstands to this day operate under a barter system, as well. You can turn-in previously read copies for credit towards new issues. Those used copies are re-sold at a discount, then a second family passes them around, and even a third. Each one of those half-million copies of any given issue of Santo may have had up to a dozen readers. Do the math, and you realize exactly how much of a cultural institution a successful comic book could be in Mexico. The audience was bigger than any arena gate or movie box office toll.

But it is that very magnitude of readership, and the extended pass-around audience that has banished the photo comics to the obscure. When a book has been pawed over by a dozen readers, exposed to the Mexico City elements on the newsstand two or three times, and was printed cheaply to begin with, there ’s not going to be much left 50 years later. With no collector mentality inherent in the populace, the comics were seen as disposable media, and finding viable collections today is somewhat miraculous.

Even less remains of the original art. The recycled collage process wouldn’t have yielded ‘original art’ pages as we know them from the American industry, and after decades of re-purposing, the separated elements probably weren ’t in the best of shape 25 years ago when Santo ceased publication. Decay, neglect, heat, air pollution, earthquakes swallowing warehouses and office buildings — who knows how much of it actually remains today.

But what of Cruz and company? What of treasury edition reprints? Nope. Sorry. Read on to reveal the strange final days of the man in the sepia-toned silver mask, but not before a look at both the cover art and an astounding rogues gallery of Santo’s larger-than-life nemeses...

Continued in... The Covers Or jump ahead to: FX sin limite Confessions of a Fake Santo Los otros SOURCE NOTES

Article text ©Keith J. Rainville, 2007. Artwork from the private collection of Keith Rainville. Content reproduced is © of the original owners.