Martin Ramirez

Checho Lopez The Complete Stories 1988 - 1991 Martin Ramirez

www.checholopez.com From the pages of the brave and controversial underground counter-cultural magazine Trauko Comics, comes to us this saga of hilarious misadventures, where Checho Lopez is a heroic unemployed man in free fall. With his house mortgaged he spends the nights on the benches of the "Forestal Park" in downtown Santiago. He's separated from his wife due to lack of communication and financial problems. Lives a toxic romance with a stripper and prostitute, and his only friend is a sleazy social climber. This urban antihero takes us to see life and the social processes of his time (or any time), which is exactly the three final years of the gruesome military and civilian dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, through his glassy eyes of ignorant sage, who doesn't lose his humor in the face of fatalism and never gives up. His brutal ingenuity and frequent state of intemperance, together with the abuse of certain substances and other transgressions, are his particular and at times heroic, way of surviving to all that life and society throw at him. In that way he strongly and piercingly touches the sensibility of the readers. With intelligence in the script and an aesthetic of "uglyism" and precariousness that has earned him to be called a "perfect realistic novel" by the critic, the social satire character Checho Lopez, was born together with the legendary underground magazine "Trauko Comics", in Santiago, Chile, April 1988. Created, written and illustrated by Martin Ramirez, Checho Lopez was an indispensable presence in 30 of the 36 issues of the magazine, with a total of 25 unforgettable stories, that put together chronologically work as the chapters of a full graphic novel, and in this volume have been rescued from the archive of oblivion, to be compiled, restored and published again as a collection book.