Background
Manuel Rodriguez was born March 2, 1940 in Buffalo, New New York
Manuel Rodriguez was born March 2, 1940 in Buffalo, New New York
Rodriguez studied at the Silvermine Guild Art School in New Caanan, Connecticut.
His experiences on the road with the biker gang, the Road Vultures, provided inspiration for his work, as did his left-wing politics. He picked up the nickname Spain as a child, when he heard some kids in the neighborhood bragging about their Irish ancestry, and he defiantly claimed Spain was just as good as Ireland. In New York City, during the late 1960s, he became a contributor to the East Village Other, which published his own comics tabloid, Zodiac Mindwarp (1968).
Strongly influenced by 1950s European Commission comic book illustrator Wally Wood, Spain pushed Wood"s sharp, crisp black shadows and hard-edged black outlines into a more simplified, stylized direction.
Examples of his starkly forceful style perfectly match Conan Doyle"s eerie stories in Sherlock Holmes" Strangest Cases. His work also extended the eroticism of Wood"s female characters.
In such classics as Mean Bitch Thrills, Spain’s ladies were raunchy, explicitly sexual and sometimes incorporated macho sadomasochistic themes. His more recent work is an illustrated biography of Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Che: A Graphic Biography (2009).
Published in several different languages, it was described by comics artist Art Spiegelman as "brilliant and radical."
Rodriguez died at his home in San Francisco on November 28, 2012, after battling cancer for six years.