Chanti: “The best of comics is among the vignettes”
"It's a lion jumping over a crocodile to fight a shark," little Chanti , about 4 years old, explains to his mother, while showing her a drawing of what was then his "abstract art." And she celebrates.
“Put ‘Help, there’s a monster chasing me!’” Chanti asks one of her older brothers (he’s the fifth of eight). “I’ll just put ‘Help’ and that’s it,” the older one replies.
They're smiling, aren't they? Chanti is like that, happy. You can see it on his face through the Zoom camera. He's just published a portable museum with the best of the first ten years of Mayor y menor , one of his children's comics most beloved by readers and by him. A milestone , moreover, in the dissemination of the genre beyond magazines.
This is The Best of Mayor y Menor (Sudamericana), hardcover, with almost 300 pages, which treasures a decade of the history of Nacho and Tobi, with Lola and the dog Peluche .
Cover. Price: 44,999 pesos.
The new book also tells a good part of the story of Chanti himself , whose real name is Santiago González Riga and who received that nickname because of the way his younger brothers used to call him “ Santi .”
Chanti was born in 1970 in Mendoza . He is a graphic designer, as well as a humorist and cartoonist. He worked for over a decade at the Fundación Vida Silvestre and published a series of books on Argentine wildlife. In addition to Mayor y Menor , he is the author of Facu y Café con Leche and Pico Pichón , among other comics. He has published around 80 books . He won the Argentine Children's and Young Adult Literature Association (ALIJA) award for comics, among others, and is a founding member of Banda Dibujada , a group dedicated to promoting children's and young adult comics.
Chanti has said that Nacho and Tobi, the protagonists of Mayor y menor, are inspired by her nephews (she's about 15). So, right from the dedication, this new book sheds light on less-traveled aspects of this classic. She says: " To my seven brothers, because with them I learned about being older and younger and, above all, how to live together."
The book includes other gems. The Kitchen of Comics . "Things that readers tend to be very interested in, things they always ask me about," Chanti tells Clarín Cultura from Mendoza, in advance of the book presentations she'll be holding in Buenos Aires.
He On Wednesday , July 30th at 5 p.m. Chanti will be at Alparamis (Libertador 2229, Olivos), on Thursday the 31st at 5 p.m. at Yenny Borges (Borges 2008, Buenos Aires City), and on August 1st at 5 p.m. at the Firmódromo del Palacio Libertad, formerly the CCK, where the Children's and Young Adult Book Fair is held until Sunday the 3rd, with free admission.
Chanti, from "Major and Minor".
What gems does The Best of Major and Minor contain? "The Comic of My Life" (by Chanti), cited at the beginning of this article. And the list goes on: the extremely detailed presentation of his study .
The book also includes the first sketches of Mayor y menor , more sketches, a drawn lesson (“This is how characters are drawn”), unpublished covers (one, unpublished until now, as it welcomes this volume) and a trivia quiz to find out how much you know about this work.
About the beginning of everything, Chanti once told Clarín : “When you're in a family with many siblings, they take care of you or you take care of others. That's why I wanted to make Mayor y menor , a comic based on the relationship between siblings. I wanted to address how parents treat them differently depending on whether they're older or younger, and what the difference is between being born first, second, or third.”
Mayor y menor is already 22 years old. It was created in 2003 for the Sunday magazine Rumbos , which was published with newspapers in the interior of the country until 2021. Furthermore, for 17 years, since Penguin Random House decided to publish the first book , the volumes have not stopped coming out. And Chanti assures that they will continue, at least for a while longer.
"How long will Major and Minor be out? I don't know... Maybe until I get tired or the characters run out of things to say . But I hope it won't be long!" he says. For now, another volume will be out in November , the second major collection of these comics.
-How did you choose the strips for this volume of The Best of Mayor y menor ?
-It was difficult. So much so that at the beginning, they had requested half of the ones that ended up coming out. Actually, by the end, almost all of them were there. I'd say we were guided by the importance of each strip to the story, by how funny and thoughtful they were.
-What happened to you when you saw all the strips together?
-It gave me a lot of satisfaction. But it's also hard for me... And when I look at some of the drawings, the older ones, I want to die! Honestly, there are many I'd do again. But I regret the ideas less than the drawings. I take comfort in the fact that that tends to happen to us cartoonists.
-To what do you attribute the 20 years of validity of Mayor y menor ?
-I think that although the world has changed in these two decades, with the emergence of technology in daily life and the widespread use of social media, kids are still kids, in the sense that what interests them most is discovering the world. And they value the stories that accompany them in that. I have a very loyal and sincere audience. I admire kids. I try to think like them. Perhaps teenagers are among the most demanding because they tend to be more attentive and more influenced by virtual things and passing fads.
"I admire the kids. I try to think like them."
-It's curious that comics have made the leap into collectible books like this one in the midst of technological transformation. Or is that precisely why?
-A little bit of everything. The book is a wonderful way to preserve the comic strips. The classic comics that appeared in Billiken or Anteojito were disappearing. The book preserves them better because it lasts much longer than the magazines themselves.
-Why do you think comics are a gateway to reading, even with competition from screens?
"It happened to me," Chanti also tells us in "The Comic of My Life," without wishing to spoil it. "But I'm still impressed by how their role in institutions has changed. When I was a kid, there were many comic books, but they were practically banned from classrooms. Then, new technologies began to displace them. But publishers and schools took over, in a way, from now on. In fact, Mayor y menor was the first children's comic book published by Sudamericana in 2008."
-The group Banda Dibujada, which you promote, was born for that.
-Yes, to promote children's comics, primarily in schools, but also in the publishing world. I'm grateful to the teachers who invite us to give talks and workshops. Thanks to that and the publication of the books, comics went from being undervalued, especially children's comics, to being studied as a specific genre.
"We comic book artists don't put everything into the illustrations, and we don't put everything into the texts either. Also, what's Tobi's voice? Nacho's?"
-So, what do you think comics contribute today?
On the one hand, there's increasing research into how neurons react more effectively when children are in front of a book or in nature instead of looking at their phones. On the other hand, we comic book artists say that the best thing is what's read between the panels. That is, we don't put everything in the illustrations, and we don't put everything in the text either. I don't use a "cartouche," which is that kind of box that indicates a change of time or place in the story. I like to signal that with the background color. Also, what's Tobi's voice? Nacho's? When reading, each reader creates.
And in the case of Mayor and Minor, they've been doing it for more than two decades. How could Chanti not be happy?
Clarin
