July 30, 2015
El Vibora y RanXerox
I was talking to my neighbor Tony the day about Catalan history and the timeline slew to the years just before and after the dictator Franco transitioned out of power and Spain opened up to the world. Whereas once the country was closed and controlled (I understate here how much this oppression was conveyed to me by my Catalan friends, my attempted descriptors had turned purple and turgid), once Spain became free and democratic, there was a massive explosion of expression. Massive. Eruption. Flip a lit match into a huge box of fireworks and magnify it into a national level.
Art exploded and in the city streets, underground magazines went aboveground. El Vibora was the prime alternative magazine of the day. The name is a subtle play on words. Vibora means viper in Spanish, also indicative of street life, specifically hard street culture, sex, drugs, rock & roll... or punk. "La vibora" is the normative designation of snakes and the replacement of "El" signified an honorific specification in the Spanish language (for example, if I wanted to talk about my friend Kiko as in a mark of honor, I would refer to him as "El Kiko).
One of the stand out recurring characters in El Vibora was an Italian creation, RanXerox. As I understand the story, RanXerox was invented, scrabbled together from Xerox machines and given as a gift to a teenage street savvy girl by the name of Lubna. Later, when she was mugged, her gift RanXerox was destroyed. Her benefactor put RanXerox back together and... oh hell, let this link tell the story:
Ranxerox was a birthday present for Lubna from some of her friends. Later, on the same day, some thugs were harassing Lubna and destroyed Ranx. The friends who built Ranx found out, they then repaired him, and set his aggressiveness levels up to the maximum amount. This explains why Ranxerox is always very brutal and destructive.
Now, James Cameron was said to have come up with his idea for Terminator after awaking from a dream in a hotel during a stay in Rome... only a few short years after RanXerox was created by Stefano Tamburini and Tanino Liberatore in their graphic novel series. I've looked online to see if anyone else suspects that some kind of intellectual property poaching was going on. No luck, so maybe I'm imagining things?
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