The cartoonist Trino has become almost a myth through his drawings, an icon for millennials who he made laugh from the Free Textbooks in the nineties, and a figure for recent generations through social networks where he remains current.
He has just launched Las crónicas marcianas de Trino. Alienígenas e conectado, a collector’s volume to remember that there is nothing like the sense of touch in such digital times.
It is a pocket book from the Aguilar publishing house that is not only limited to the characteristic cartoons, but is complemented with elements that reveal the personality of the cartoonist, whose full name is José Trinidad Camacho Orozco (Guadalajara, 1961).
The book was presented just last December at the Ghandi bookstore in Miguel Ángel de Quevedo and at the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL), where he was accompanied by comedian Andrés Bustamante as presenter, and was a success among the attending earthlings.
There, in a funny dialogue, in which Trino even made a jam of live drawings about how an alien could look, according to the different visions of the FIL audience, he also assured that the most similar thing imaginable to an alien is like an octopus, with different arms and the most similar to a mollusk.
For the cartoonist from Guadalajara, National Journalism Award in Political Cartoons (2000) with different publications of the series El Santos, Historias desconocidas de la Independencia y la Revolución, Historias desconocidas de la Conquista, Historias del fin del mundo y otras patrañas, ¡Viva la familia!… pero bien lejos and El regreso del rey chiquito, the alien theme is of so much curiosity despite not believing in UFOs, but it fascinates him, he says to Proceso from Ajijic, next to Lake Chapala, Jalisco, where he lives:
“Talking about aliens or spaceships is like talking about a modern tale. We all know someone who has a story about UFOs, whether they have seen them, whether they were abducted, whether they know where they come from, etc., and to me it seems like fertile ground because I don’t believe in them. I would love for something to happen to me or to have a good reference on the subject.
“However, the evidence of ‘extraterrestrial life’ refers to things so strange that they are not at all credible, and that is where the fertile ground on the subject comes from.”
The cartoonist recalls a film that inspired him, Contact, based on the novel of the same name by Carl Sagan (who also worked on the script, although he did not see the premiere because he died earlier months due to cancer) and directed by Robert Zemeckis, who tells the story of a scientist (Jodie Foster) who seeks “contact” without leaving planet Earth, and achieves it in the least expected way, through dreams.
Also, more recently, The Arrival (2016), in which the US government hires its best linguist (Amy Adams) to try to figure out how to communicate with an alien, a figure very similar to a giant octopus that can only be seen in the shadows.
–It seems that this theme is the way I found to point out the good, and especially the bad of humans, specifically Mexicans and their way of life…
–Going back to the subject of Contact, a joke occurs to me: If with that type of extraterrestrial contact they are going to take me to a nice beach, I want to think of something cool to happen, and if I want to see an alien I will think of Lord Molecule… So, if an alien appears to me in its real version (because they say they are very ugly and scary), they will no longer seem so ugly to me –he says while laughing.
“I think of aliens, not like in the Predator movie, but rather of small microscopic beings, and maybe I am not far off if we see our body and elements with a microscope… it is like another world through a lens.”
That vision is in various cartoons throughout Trino’s Martian Chronicles. Aliens and Integrated. where he describes different worlds inside a man’s wig or a topper of food in the refrigerator. The 115-page pocket volume has cardboard covers from between 2003 and 2006, all published in the Reforma newspaper consecutively.
–There are elements where you also seem to break the “fourth wall” in your drawings. When did you decide to do that and why?
–There are many things that influence me. I love getting into taxis because taxi drivers are always going to know about three topics: politics, soccer, and aliens. In each one they are informed and they always tell you stories, that is also where part of the inspiration comes from, and I think about how this or that would look in a drawing.
The introduction to the volume reads:
“I love those videos in which you see postcards of alien ships next to the Popocatépetl volcano passing at unimaginable speeds near an airplane, or in cloud covers, and my other possible scenario could be that these apparitions are life from other dimensions, and this seems more attractive, more modern to me. Let me explain: what if these captured ships are not from other galaxies, but from humans who have already discovered how to travel from the future to the past and organize VTP (all-expenses-paid) excursions to see live how the twin towers collapse, how a volcano erupts, how Atlas wins its last two-time championships in history… or other important events in humanity.
“What if we are returning to see how we screwed up in history, what if they are tours of primary schools of the future and they bring children to see us as if they were going to the Africam Safari in Puebla? In none of these possibilities do I find any reliable scientific evidence that can prove such claims…”.
Trino says that the compilation of all the drawings was done during the Vicente Fox administration, referring to everything social that was experienced in those years:
“They tell me that if I talk about politics, about the 4T, about Fox, and people give it so many interpretations that make me seem very intelligent, the truth is that the social context is inevitable, but I am not guided by it either, it is not my interest”.
–But it does have a political touch. As you say, it is inevitable…
–Yes, because I think about what an extraterrestrial would find if he came to Earth. Well, he would see corruption, theft, and all the material that is generated in the Chamber of Deputies, that is what they are going to find.
–There are several six-year delays, including the one by the 4T to publish The Martian Chronicles…
–I have to make another six volumes because there are people who read them in the newspaper, but if you were not subscribed it is actually as if you were reading them for the first time, so by the time the 4T’s are published we may already be in other political times, and it will surely be like that, but the important thing is that you can read them as you like. There are even those who say that time has not passed them by, and that above all they laugh a lot… This is enough for me, because the way things are in the world, in the country, laughter is what helps.
Source: proceso
