ISSUE: Fall 2007
In October 2006, Argentinean cartoonist Liniers was invited by the daily paper La Nación to join a delegation of artists and journalists on an expedition to Antarctica. He created a series of short strips based on the expedition for the newspaper, but the pages reproduced here are not those selected, compact episodes but rather his daily notebook entries—all kept in comics form. “It’s a kind of personal chronicle of the cruise,” Liniers wrote in an e-mail to VQR, but speculated dryly that his selection for the trip had been based solely on his “love for drawing penguins.” This comment bespeaks Liniers’s sly, self-effacing style. His comics are simple and direct to the point of sometimes seeming wide-eyed and wet behind the ears, but there is a candor that comes with his sincerity and a savage wit that lurks just under the surface. As Roberto Fontanarrosa has written, “Liniers’s style is naïve. But beware, unprepared passerby! It is the primal naïveté of a lion that eats a gazelle.” In short, Liniers was not selected for the Antarctic expedition merely for his skill—and penchant—for drawing penguins; he was chosen because he understands what these awkward birds and the icy, ownerless place they inhabit have to tell us.
—Ted Genoways
