Mort Cinder can die, it’s just that he never got the hang of the ‘staying dead’ part. His adventures throughout human history exploring the underside of whatever society he is born into, are brought to life by the stunning artwork of Alberto Breccia – which should, by rights, make him as revered in the English-speaking world as he is in Latin America.
Written by Hector German OesterheldCover by Alberto Breccia
Illustrated by Alberto Breccia
Translated by Erica MenaThis episodic graphic novel follows the journey of Mort Cinder, a man who rises from the grave each time he is killed. His travels through time, space, and the darkest corners of humanity are shown from the point of view of Ezra Winston, an antiquarian who becomes Mort’s companion. Alberto Breccia’s experimental chiaroscuro captures the expressive faces of hardened prisoners, shell-shocked soldiers, and grotesque grave robbers; his atmospheric stories take the reader to eerie cemeteries, ancient Babylonian tombs, and the treacherous waters of the Atlantic.
Presented in English for the first time, these horror-adventure tales are as chilling and accessible as they were half a century ago. Breccia, who is recognized as one of the most influential cartoonists in the world, created Mort Cinder between 1962–1964 in collaboration with the Argentine writer Héctor Oesterheld, best known in the U.S. for the award-winning The Eternaut.
“Mort Cinder” is quite a strange story. Throughout most of it we do not witness the adventures of the eponymous protagonist directly, instead we witness these stories as he recalls them, to his only friend and confident, art dealer Ezra Winston. This choice is surely no coincidence, nor merely a convenient excuse to tie together a series of otherwise unconnected narratives into something similar to a popular adventure strip (such as “Corto Maltese”).
Ezra and Mort provide different paths for us to look at history: for Winston history is bits and pieces, things that he can buy and sell, things that can make him richer (but often make him poorer); for Mort Cinder history is people, humanity in all its glory and ugliness. Mort Cinder, both as a person and as a story, invites us to look beyond the big picture, all the grand battles and events we learned about in school, and into the little details that compose it. We think of armies while he thinks of the individual soldier.
It’s fitting, therefore, that whenever and wherever Mort Cinder is being reborn he finds himself near enough the bottom of the social ladder without actually reaching it – allowing him a unique vantage point: he is a slave in ancient times, building a giant monument that he does not fully understand, but his youth and vigor allow him a station above his fellow slaves; he is a poor sailor on a wooden ship, but there are slaves on board and he is not one them. Whatever the story Mort Cinder is the eternal middle.
Aside from the opening story, “Lead Eyes” (the longest chapter in this book), the tales here are rather free-roaming in their approach. “Lead Eyes” is a rather conventional supernatural mystery involving kidnappings, riddles and threatening beings appearing from the shadows in the least comfortable moments. Yet even in that story there is something beyond the surface: The Leaden Eyed Men, who provide both the threat and the mystery, represent humans whose individuality has been completely subsumed; the villain seeks to create utopia by making all people into things; this is the way of villain figures throughout most of the pieces here – slave-masters in one way or another.
“Lead Eyes” is probably the weakest piece in this book, mostly down to several scenes in which narration abridges certain actions when the creators run out of room on the page; but already in it you can see the creators building towards the greatness of later pieces: the heartfelt “Charlie’s Mother” (about a woman waiting for a son to return from the war) or gut punch “The Slave Ship.” But even the weakest part of this collection is well worth the effort if only to gaze at the wondrous art of Alberto Breccia. Indeed, in a rather rare move for the American market we see his name first on the cover and afterword announces this book to be the first in a series – The Alberto Breccia Library – to bring all his work to new audiences.
Continued belowThe back cover boldly espouses “Before Mike Mignola…. Before Frank Miller…. There was Breccia.” And while often this sort of promotion is tiring, an artist is surely more than the sum of his influences, you can certainly understand why they chose these two popular artists: you can see Miller and Mignola, and many others after them, in these bold poses, and the way the artist depicts shadows, in how blackness compliments the white (here I talk both morally and artistically).
In a way Breccia is more like Jack Kirby – his work casts such a long shadow that it almost becomes a genre by itself; that it is hard to imagine what comics would look like if we didn’t have him. His pencils seem perfect to illustrate scenes of horror and tension, see how Ezra stalks his way across a graveyard at night, not knowing who or what is following him, but they are more than that: in the eyes and faces he draws we see, cliché as it may be, a window to the soul.
“Mort Cinder” is not as great as we’d want it to be: sometimes it is a limitation of the format it was originally made for (serialized for an anthology), sometimes it is the writer who falters a bit (choosing tried and true ideas, twists straight out of “Amazing Stories”). But the art never falters; given what we see here The Alberto Breccia Library is sure to be one of the highlights of 2019, just as this work is as fine a closer as you can choose for 2018.
