AN UNUSUAL INTERVIEW WITH MIGUEL ÁNGEL MARTÍN

AN UNUSUAL INTERVIEW WITH MIGUEL ÁNGEL MARTÍN

Interview of the editor Nicola Pesce with Miguel Ángel Martín.

Photo by Federica Palmarin

Dear Miguel, on the occasion of the release of a new reissue of your works with Edizioni NPE, i.e. the book NeuroWorld, I thought I’d give you a long and unusual interview. You know me, so you know I won’t ask the usual questions about your content. I take it for granted that we are both psychopaths and I will not feign amazement that children and kittens die in your comics.

It was a blast re-reading Cronache dell’Isolazionismo, contained within this new volume, after the quarantine and after (during?) Covid.

The things you had drawn, which twenty years ago seemed so right and so true to me, in a science fiction perspective, today I feel normal as a part of me and there is no longer any science fiction perspective: it is today. Reality has partially reached your books of twenty years ago. Today we order everything on the internet and we don’t want to deal with shop assistants. Today we shun (and gladly!) human interaction. Today men can choose women like on an internet catalog and have them delivered to their homes, and women can choose men. There is still something futuristic and true in that book. Today we are careful to show ourselves all in the same way (rich, lucky and beautiful), while in the book the protagonist tries to lose all connotations, blunts his nose and cheekbones, wants to become anonymous: to disappear as an individual in order (perhaps) to make every interaction. How I understand it! While on the one hand I appear more and more on social media, I begin to see that face as not mine, as a public face, which does not correspond to mine, and I would like to cut off any human characterization and become unrecognizable so that, when I’m not on social media, I can remove my face as a mask and remain completely anonymous underneath.

Photo by Javier Negrorojoluz

“What a terrible world! Terrifying!” I would have said ten years ago. Today it seems to me more and more beautiful and reassuring. In part, this is due to a long conversation we had in Rome on the occasion of a MIA Festival a long time ago when, deserting the conventions, we went for a walk in a sort of pub crawl without exaggeration. In fact, you were the first human being to tell me about the future as beautiful. Your vision was positive. The present is better for you than the past.

I haven’t heard this often. And therefore, I would like to hear it from your mouth, help me understand: how are things going for you? How do you see it? In general, humanity, the future. Are you afraid that they control us more and more like in 1984 or you see it differently. In general: tell us about the future.

I well remember that beautiful night walk in Rome! True, I’m optimistic. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t draw the comics I do with the intention of making a living, hahaha!

I don’t know what the future will be like, nobody knows! I’m just saying that the present is much better than the past because poverty and violence have drastically decreased throughout the world in the last 50 years. Just compare today’s images with those of 40 years ago in Italy itself. A radical positive change has certainly arrived with the Internet. A technology that no one could foresee. This is why I say that the present is better than the past. It is estimated that, at this rate, extreme poverty will be eradicated from the world by 2050. Hopefully! We’ll see.

Happiness and fear are separate, ha ha!

However, it is interesting that, despite the overwhelming evidence that things are getting better, at least for the moment, the general feeling is that everything is worse. Surely the continuous media bombardment of bad news (“good news is not news”) is the cause of that feeling of anxiety, combined with the fact that we are in a world of transition to another. As happened with the industrial revolution, only more accelerated. I suppose that, seen from an evolutionary point of view, it is a form of defense and adaptation to the new.

However, there is an interesting fact about this: the level of depressions and suicides has increased. Why, if we are living in a world where the quality of life has increased so much? Experts don’t know yet.

From Malthus (1766-1834) until today, apocalyptic predictions of overpopulation, starvation or climate change (ex global warming) have been made and none have come true! Unfortunately! Because I’ve always dreamed of living in the world of Mad Max: going to the sea in Milan, visiting the submerged Colosseum and betting on the Thunder Dome: two in, only one out. And don’t go out! Ha ha ha!

Photo by Javier Negrorojoluz

Hahaha! I really see you dressed in leather and studs dominating the inhabitants of a dystopian city with your ruthless smile!

I apologize if I continue to ask you specific questions about the future, but I am driven by the lively curiosity to know the opinion of a person I respect. Which I respect to the point that I know that he will be able to tell me something that I hadn’t thought of.

When you see that Amazon is conquering the world and making everyone else go bankrupt, that China is getting bigger and pulling ground out from under all of us, that situations like the one in Afghanistan have remained unresolved for a time that seems infinite, that the databases that they sleep in the cool of the North Pole they already know everything about us, what we eat, what we want to buy, what are our most hidden desires… in short, when you see all this, doesn’t it scare you?

The question has particular reference to the individual cases of Amazon, China, Afghanistan and databases.

Then I swear I’ll change the subject!

I’m not scared. My books are on Amazon, ha ha! I didn’t know there was a database at the North Pole. I always believed there was an alien Nazi base, ha ha! I’m more concerned about the state having all my personal, health, banking and tax information without me voluntarily giving it to them, like I did with Amazon instead! By the way, Amazon’s main competitor is called Alibaba and it is Chinese! The worst thing about companies today is that they don’t just sell products, they sell morality and ideology: “sustainability,” political correctness, and other totalitarian rubbish. Those are the “products” that replace traditional religion. The tendency towards totalitarianism is always present in human nature. The case of Afghanistan is an example of this. Without forgetting that communist totalitarianism has not yet disappeared. In Peru, a communist president has just won, and there is China which, although open to the market, is still a totalitarian pigsty. It is the political correctness just mentioned, understood as a new form of totalitarianism. Of course, I have no sympathy for monopolies, be they market or state monopolies. If we can see the present moment without judging it, we will realize that these are fascinating times! Or at least I try, ha, ha!

Fear is what all those who want totalitarian power seek. If you are afraid, it is easy to convince yourself that you need a Savior: the state, a messiah, a technocrat… If you are afraid you are lost!

Photo by Javier Negrorojoluz

Your comics are “science fiction” in the best sense of the word, in my opinion. In fact, they don’t focus specifically on the future itself and on the scientific discoveries that will or will not be part of our lives: they focus on the plot, on life, on interpersonal relationships, and the “future” is simply present as a side dish (and for this reason appears to the eyes of us readers all the more real and amazes us).

No one in Italy has yet defined Miguel Ángel Martín as a science fiction author but for me you are one of the greatest exponents of the genre: you have not only the ability to present it in an original and interesting way, but also to foresee trends and discoveries.

If we look at some comics you wrote even before the internet took hold, we see people doing everything “on television”, ordering everything “online”, living “in quarantine”.

Where do you get your inspiration? How do you know so many years in advance (which is centuries today. Predicting an invention today that will work in ten years is pure magic!) what the future will be?

You are right. I’m not considered a science fiction author, and I certainly am! My first comic published in a national magazine was The Space Between, in the Spanish magazine «Zona 84», a science fiction comic! Series, among other things, much criticized by readers at the time of him: «Bad, disgusting», they said among other things, ha ha! Rubber Flesh and Brian the Brain are clearly science fiction. And fantasy was and is always present in some way in all my comics: those cars without wheels!

Two of my literary references are William Burroughs and J. G. Ballard, unquestionably science fiction authors, but not considered as such in science fiction circles. Maybe the same thing is happening with my comic. I have never considered myself a visionary. I just talked and talk about the things that interest me, almost everything related to human nature. My top three influences are science (not science fiction, ha ha!), technology and pornography. Not typical Rocco Siffredi porn, but sophisticated dirty fetish porn, ha ha! With the pandemic many people have told me that I am a visionary, because of the confinement and the masks. But the confinement I was talking about wasn’t due to a pandemic, it’s due to the Japanese phenomenon known as hikikomori, where teenagers voluntarily lock themselves away to avoid social contact. And my gas masks have never had anything to do with contamination or contagion, but with sexual fetishism, much more fun, ha ha! These are coincidences that make you pass as a guru or a visionary but I’m not. Sorry, I didn’t kill Liberty Valance (my favorite John Ford movie, which I recommend) but you can spread this legend about me if you prefer, ha ha!

However, my absolute favorite film is Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, which reflects my ideology very well, in the sense of how I look at the world, at life.

For me ideology is to subscribe to, sympathize with or support a set of values or ideas (ideology) but whether those values are shared with one, millions or nobody I don’t give a damn. Because I start from the foundation that those values are good on their own, not because of the amount of people who support them and even less because of the color of the shirts they wear.

I realized that for people it is more important to be part of a herd (right/left, north/south) than to have ideas. Sure, this is evolutionarily reasonable but I’m not a reasonable person (you can tell if you look at my comics) and I don’t want to be, ha ha!

In a fine work of “meta comic” you often talk about art within your comic art. And the art you speak of takes on ever more extreme connotations, perhaps projected into that distant future in which you see so well and we don’t. Art becomes either devoid of any human element (collapsing buildings, street noise, random computer-generated sequences) or extreme, it becomes violence, the more violent the stronger the perpetrator and the more defenseless the victim.

So, I ask you: how come art loses more and more every human connotation in your works?

And, side by side, why are you so interested in representing the oppression of a human being by other human beings?

In reality I have never spoken of the future but of the present with a little projection. When I drew The Space Between and Rubber Flesh in the early and mid-90s, almost everything I mention already existed, what happens is that almost nobody talked about it, at least not in the world of comics. Many of the information I show in those comics have been taken from mainstream magazines and newspapers, others have been elements that have inspired electronic music artists such as Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Clock DVA.

Art is a product of human nature, so it is impossible for it to lose its human connotation. We tend to consider “inhuman” what we don’t like, but there is really nothing so human: the brutal totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, communism and Nazism. The savage human sacrifices of the Aztecs. Those atrocities were committed by human beings. And they continue to become, as in Afghanistan, the trend topic of the moment.

And I’m just an artist, and as such, I have no social responsibilities or ethical sympathies. And, as I said before, I’m interested in everything that relates to the human being.

a page taken from NeuroWorld

A very recurring phrase today is “nothing can be said anymore”, and refers to the fact that it would be too easy – they say – to offend some minority every time you open your mouth. Many people feel threatened by the advance of normality, that is threatened by the increased presence of people of other nationalities, or of other sexual orientations or still different from the “majority” for whatever reason.

Instead, in your comics for forty years children have been butchered, serial killers shown, sentences of terrible cynicism uttered, and the public adores you. How do you think this happens? Do you find it more difficult, in recent years, to have your say freely?

This phenomenon began to explode in the late 1990s. It may be related to the rise of social networks, which did not exist until then. My use of social media is minimal. It just advertises my artistic activities. It’s not my intention to make friends and I don’t follow anyone anywhere. I know very well where to find the information and opinions that interest me on various topics. I don’t care about the noise generated by the networks. In my opinion the “offended” are actually a minority making noise amplified by the mainstream media. But I want to believe that it’s just my impression, that they don’t reflect the real opinions of the majority. It is typical for activists to make noise to draw attention to their causes. The activist is the typical crybaby. The pity is that the mainstream media reaches out to them instead of generating their own content. And that politicians pay attention to them as if their attitude were a reflection of the whole of society. And I believe it is not. In any case I don’t take them into consideration, as it is easy to deduce from my comic. In Spain most of the controversies and offenses – at least, not all – are for ideological reasons: “fools from Villarriba against idiots from Villabajo” ha ha! The truth is, I’m not interested in anything.

But society is polarized as never before. And that’s not good for us as a society or as people. And I don’t think that anyone thought about it but it just happened. In my opinion it is an unforeseen consequence of new technologies that project even the worst of the human being.

A Chinese proverb says “May you have to live in fascinating times”. These are!

Thank you, Miguel, for your time. I reread your answers three times, and in the end, I felt like smiling despite all my pessimism: it’s true, these are fascinating times! In the meantime, I’m off to read your NeuroWorld again. Until next time!

Neuroworld

Author: Martín Miguel Ángel

Series: Miguel Ángel Martín

Number in series: 8

Format: volume 16.5×24 cm, hardcover with b/w dust jacket, pg.224

ISBN: 9788836270262

Price: €19.90