Lucy in the Sky, or the autobiography of pop culture – a review of the comic book “Shankar”, volume 2

Another classic adventure

At first, nothing will surprise you – Shankar will perform in the circumstances of well-known stories. He will meet Buddha, Mr. Hyde, Dorian Gray … All these relationships will have a clear message telling about the duality of human nature. If this is what – metaphor and adventure – that interests you most in the first volume, you will be pleased and immediately plunge into the currents of this story. Otherwise, just like me, you will feel a slight disappointment. I liked the previous book of universal hero adventures, but the repetition of the convention made me a little tired this time.

I was about to start complaining about Mazzitelli and Alcatena, but I read on, a bit out of review duty. And to my joy, something new, evidently metatextual, started to emerge from this comic, bringing Shankar closer to the wonderful Living Steel . I lived to see a change of perspective, monsters that take over the narrative, and finally surrealism, and even … Brit rock.

All the faces of popular culture

We’ve seen Shankar before not only in myth and folklore, but also in popular adventure novels for teenagers. He accompanied Indonesian pirates, he hit situations straight from Lovecraft … And now on the cover you can see King Kong or Guy Fawkes, whose character was first popularized by Alan Moore, and then by the Anonymous movement. Let’s add Buddhist themes to this – it looks to be serious multiculturalism.

The most interesting, however, will be what you will not see immediately. Shankar will meet Alice in Wonderland, older and more serious now, who can no longer take lightly her episodes of growing, diminishing, and general desertion from reality. He will fall into the surrealism that I missed so much after Stal, because I find Alcatena the most interesting in this aesthetic. And finally, the most important gods of the 20th century will appear. They are not on the cover, so I will not spoil excessively, the more and less subtle announcements will be hitting your ears in half of this volume.

Autobiography?

As you move towards the end of this comic, you will slowly begin to realize that this is not necessarily an exercise in placing one character in many classical contexts. It is a story about a recipient of culture, a passionate reader, a fan of genre cinema, the owner of an elegant turntable and a collection of vinyl records. Someone who caught up with every fascinating story: Boris Vian and Ian Fleming, the Bhagavad Gita took turns reading with B-horror movies, he strove for enlightenment, but was a bit distracted by the successive fashions and cultural revolutions of the previous century. He certainly wore flowers in his hair, although he was a dandy in his early youth. And now, in retrospect, he can tell his life book by book and film by film – because they shaped him. He underwent successive pop culture phenomena as if he were their hero. After all, like Shankar, sailed with pirates, visited Skull Island, caught a train to India, traveled through nineteenth-century London …

It’s not necessarily an autobiography of someone from my generation – our point of arrival is far from Buddhism, but we’ve traveled part of that path together. It was shown to us by our parents, who may be a little younger than Mazzitel and Alcatena, or maybe around their age. We used to read Cortázar and Latin American literature, while in Argentina probably European stories had a similar flavor to distant lands. And everyone listened to similar music, which connects continents and generations like “calling through the world” by Gałczyński.