“In a dystopian Latin America, Detective Joe Santos is forced back into active duty after twenty years to investigate a series of crimes that have covered ‘New Amazon’ with blood and death. A drug made with a valuable mineral kills its consumers in a few days, after fulfilling some of their most sordid desires. Can Santos – in the company of the unbearable automaton C-Cilia – solve this time the mystery that in the past ended his career, shattered part of his body and caused the death of his former companion?”
That’s part of the plot of “The Last Detective,” a national cartoonist created by Brazilian Geraldo Borges, Marvel cartoonist and DC Comics in such popular titles as X-Men, Wolverine, Darth Vader, Batman and Robin, and Justice League; and Chilean writer and editor Claudio Alvarez, screenwriter also of the independent local comics El Gran Guarén and El Ejército de Dios.
United States and Brazil
The comic book, which reimagines South America and whose first part was published by the publishing house Acción Comics last January, will have the presentation of its final installment this Friday 18 at 12:00 hours, in the online version of the event The Fury of the Book (www.lafuriadellibro.com). But not only that: in January and February Joe Santos’ adventures will come to the United States, in the pages of the influential heavy metal magazine; and also in the eyes of Brazilian readers, through the publishing house Conrad (responsible in Brazil for the publication of titles ranging from Sandman to Calvin and Hobbes).
“It’s a surprise that the comic comes out almost simultaneously in Chile, the United States and Brazil,” alvarez says. “On the one hand the premise of history opened doors for us, but the fundamental thing was the world Geraldo created with his drawings, that convinced the editors. We are glad that a comic that was born in Chile can reach so many new readers”, says the writer of the work, which has the colors of the Brazilian Arthur Hesli and the labels of the Chilean Bernardo Briceño.
In this regard, Borges, a Brazilian who was born in Chile two years ago and founder of the Quadriños Estudio school, adds that “the universal character of El Último Detective, with the classic journey of the hero who has a chance to redeem a mistake from his past, mixed with the particular universe of New Amazon, make the magazine a super entertaining reading. In this second part we continue to present aspects of Brazil, but we also see Chile’s place in this new world, as a tribute to the nationalities of the creative team.”
Heavy Metal Spirit
For Mexican R.G. Llarena, managing editor of the American magazine Heavy Metal, founded in 1977 and a mandatory reference in the sci-fi and fantasy comic (with forays into film in 1981 and 2000), The Last Detective “is precisely what we are looking for. It has its own mystique and an aesthetic of its own. I look for works that have the spirit of Heavy Metal, where parts of a known genre, embrace it completely and from there you start knitting a narrative thread that goes towards new modalities. Let’s hope he has the acceptance in the American audience that I anticipate, because this is something easily transferable even to a movie.”
For her part, Cassius Medauar, editor of Brazil’s Conrad, says that the first thing that caught her eye of history was “the great art of Geraldo Borges, but then the mixture of a futuristic fictional story that unfolds in South America, especially in the Amazon, ended up conquering me”. Medauar states that the publication of this title can open doors for other national comics in Brazil: “having read and then agreed to publish El Último Detective in Brazil, Caught my eye on the Chilean market and made me search and know several other comics, such as El Gran Guarén, for example”.
