Fierro, or - Argentina, that very comic country.

It is indeed rare that the general ineptitude, intellectual insufficiency, paste-like composition and universal degeneracy of a people shines through so uniformly and is displayed so ubiquitously as is the case with the mediterranean rejects that compose the population of Argentina.

To illustrate this point, which I expect contradicts whatever preconceived notions you might harbor on the topic (which in turn strictly survive because you do not live here), allow me to recount the story of my first acquisition of a comicbook in well over a decade. Because I saw this on a newstand :

So I ask the man "Fierro, por favor" and he offers me... some indistinct pulp magazine. I don't even remember what it had on the cover it was so unmemorably dull and unequivocally boring. "No ella, la buena" I protest, and he needs no further clarification. He pulls the thing I had seen from the outside window and sells it to me. It was, you see, a back edition. The back edition, no doubt the only time in that thing's existence when it was noteworthy to any degree. But we'll come back to this.

So I look inside, and I see this :

The drawing is obviously not of the same quality, inasmuch as whoever drew it necessarily didn't see a cunt in his entire acneic existence. There's a - very marked! - difference between the deliberate, careful, code-aware and purpose-driven stylisation of human anatomy as displayed on the cover and the haphazard collection of disparate, meaningless, flat items only related to human anatomy through the sheer ignorance and impenetrable darkness clinging to the flat walls in the author's brainbox. Moreover, that advertising page on the left is so broken, both visually and conceptually, it worries you to think they could nevertheless afford the slot.

Yet there's valuable information here, and I quote :

FIERRO (#103). La Historieta Argentina. Staffⁱ : Director : Juan Sasturain, Jefe de Redaccion : Lautaro Ortiz, Diseno : Gabriel R. Minvielle. Editorial La Pagina SA, Solis 1525 CP C1134ADG CABA Argentina.
Impreso en el mes de mayo de 2015 en Kollor Press SA, Uruguay 124, Avellaneda.

Moving on, from the editorial page we find that

Specifically of interest, the lead-in:

Me gusta o al menos no me molesta pensar en la posibilidad de un lector ocasional de Fierro que se clave con la poderosa tapa de El Tomi, una maravilla mas. Quiero decir : que haya un desprevenido que suponga - a partir de esta imagen fuerte e sensual: el literal meter mano - el contenido de una revista alevosa o basicamente pajera (si cabe a la categoria soez), sin entrar en detalles escabrosos.

Uncharitably translated, this lengthy periphrasis comes to "It doesn't bother me to think that we've been doing this for over 100 issues, and we're still in the position where occasional readers submit material that's at its worst way, way above anything we ever produce on our own. We have other things to worry about than quality or productivity. We're Argentines, all we care about is pretense, periphrasis, and finding large bowls of liquids into which to put our faces and blow as hard as we can."

If you're more charitable you might come to formally different, but substantially identical results. Here's what this contemptible piece of pulp, this sorry waste of ink, this offensive maculature unfit to wrap fishguts into contains otherwise :

Confronted with this painfully acute poverty - of image and of imagination, of form and of color, and of content and of hands that aren't muddy feet and of everything else, the 70 yo retard going by the name of Juan Sasturain does exactly what you'd expect of an Argentine : he drones on, meaninglessly, unrelatedly. He drones on, piling piles of the same tired old shit he overheard while waiting tables for some English speakers, a while ago. He thinks that's the greatest thing ever.

He actually imagines, in his very servile but well stretched and well oiled asshole that plays in his case, like in each and every one of his compatriots' cases, the role of "brain" - or at the very least central ganglia - that the real problem here is whether anyone jacks off on his "respectable magazine". That's his issue. Not like Cummings actually made and distributed his cum-stained poetry in limited editions. Not like anything whatsoever happened since about 1880 or so, Britannia still rules the waves in these fucktarded heads, long after anyone who'd even understand what that was all about is even around anymore!

The mental inadvertency, the cultural irrelevance, the completely autistic derealisation of this schmuck is not merely a sad comment on the eventual fate of any one individual, and it's not simply the story of "what it's like to be 70 and not have a clue anymore". This entire country is 70, in its head. And has been, for nigh on a century already.

Yes, it's this bad. The one thing that may prevent foreigners from comprehending the true spirit of Argentina is those foreigners' disinclination to actually believe just how fucking stupid Argentines are, collectivelly and individually.

But hey, at least we won't think they're sucking cock, you know ?

1. Seriously. Because they didn't JUST lose the Falklands to the Brits - they also lost their anal virginity. Willingly. Multiple times. [↩]