José Muñoz: Broken Voices

Argentine comics artist José Muñoz (b. 1942) uses stark black-and-white contrasts for narratives ranging from dramatic crime stories about detective Alack Sinner to a sensitive biography of jazz legend Billie Holiday. The exhibition presents original drawings from his comic classics, preliminary sketches, illustrations, portrait works and recent independent works in colour.

With their hard-boiled stories about private detective and ex-policeman Alack Sinner, featuring stark black-and-white contrasts, Argentine comics artist Muñoz and his compatriot, author Carlos Sampayo (b. 1943), set a milestone in the history of comics. Together, they created the anti-hero Alack Sinner, who at first glance seems to embody all the clichés of his kind, as he is disillusioned, melancholic, lonely and addicted to alcohol.

However, the series, which began in 1975 and continued for decades, goes far beyond the typical boundaries of the genre. It interweaves classic crime fiction with pointed social criticism (aimed at racism and corruption, for example) and refers to events such as the wars in Vietnam and the Gulf, as well as the attack on the World Trade Center’s twin towers. While Sinner, unlike other comic-book heroes, ages and changes both externally and internally, Muñoz’s drawing style remains consistently and uncompromisingly black and white: fields of black ink fill quickly drawn outlines, with no hatching or shades of grey. The characters oscillate between almost realistic depictions and grotesque caricatures – a tense interplay between nightmare and reality.