Mr. Mendoza’s Paintbrush
Luis Alberto Urrea and Christopher Cardinale. Cinco Punto (www.cincopuntos.com), $17.95 paper (64p) ISBN 978-1-933693-23-1
This lovely comics adaptation of a short story by major Latino writer Urrea may have found the ideal way to present magical realism graphically. As a boy growing up in the little town of Rosario, the narrator observes things in the natural world around him wonderfully ripening, but he also catches glimpses of marvelous forces that intrude into mundane life. Mr. Mendoza, meanwhile, is offended by the small-minded pomp and hypocrisy of the townspeople and posts his observations in sometimes scathing, sometimes enigmatic graffiti written on objects, animals, and people. Cardinale presents this in a mixture of crosshatching and scratchboard style that makes each panel resemble a static woodcut—but one that interacts dynamically with surrounding action. The scenes look only temporarily solid, an especially appropriate condition for the story’s conclusion, when Mendoza abandons the town by climbing steps he draws in the air. A different level of “realism” in the art wouldn’t have maintained the ambiguity that makes the tale’s magic so hauntingly effective. (May)
Kirkus Reviews (*starred review)
The residents of the small Mexican town of El Rosario don't quite know what to make of Mr. Mendoza and his omnipresent paintbrush. Is he merely a vandal, spreading snippets of esoteric nonsense around town with a few strokes of his brush? Or an overlooked philosopher who has explanations for life's greatest mysteries? The self-described Mexican King of Graffiti, Mendoza spares no one the mischievous spitfire of his brush-neither El Rosario's residents nor God Himself. When a series of unfortunate incidents befall the town-from the devastating storm that rains down corpses to the mine collapse that drags large swaths of town into a gaping abyss-Mendoza is there with paint-dripped commentary, urging residents to investigate the nature of life itself. Urrea's delightful tale of morality and meaning is rendered masterfully by Cardinale's boisterous illustrations, their bold outlines providing heft to the surrealism. This tale, in their steady hands, becomes a cheeky tour through elements of Latin pop culture: Hints of Romero's horrors, Rivera's aesthetics and Garcia Marquez's magical realism all make their appearance here. An enchanting exploration of life's myriad mysteries. (Graphic fiction. 13 & up)
Mexican poet and fiction writer Urrea offers a delicious and inspired tale of his youth, handsomely and humorously expanded in dimension by Cardinale’s brightly hued sequential art panels. The rhythms of the narrative and the stylized, woodblock-like images evoke the Mexican village Urrea remembers as home to pretty young girls, sharp-tongued older women, and a mysterious old man who spent his days creating accusations and moralizing boasts in the form of graffiti that appeared on every possible surface, from exhumed seventeenth-century skeletons to the whorehouse wall to Urrea’s own forehead and buttocks. This is sequential art storytelling at its finest, whether the reader is experienced with the format or comes to it with an established interest in Urrea’s writing. Some scenes are laugh-aloud funny, others thrillingly chilling, and the whole a fable-like memoir that should win Urrea and Cardinale a large, welcoming audience. — Francisca Goldsmith
In a small town where the drawings make you smell the heat and the burros, the enigmatic Mr. Mendoza has appointed himself graffiti king. Writing on walls, corpses, unwilling bystanders, and teens caught peeping at girls, the self-designated group conscience wields his brush with sardonic wit, scrawling on the cemetery's wall, for example, "Mendoza never slept here" and on a sign with the town's name, "No intelligent life for 100 kilometers." Then the scribe announces his departure, and everyone is abuzz. Will he just walk out? Kill himself? But Mendoza's brush has a life of its own in providing an escape route. Adapted from the short story collection Six Kinds of Sky, Urrea's magical realist parable about growing up in Mexico turned out to be strangely prophetic. For Urrea himself, Latino Hall of Fame inductee and Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Devil's Highway, the conscience-driven Word, like Mendoza's brush, allowed him to ascend to literary and journalistic acclaim. VERDICT Cardinale's colorful, wood-block-style art paints this lively tale about Rosario and its townspeople with nostalgia and humor. A gem for libraries, especially those seeking Latino-themed titles. High school age and up.— M.C.
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