Spain Rodriguez
Manuel Rodriguez (March 2, 1940 – November 28, 2012), better known as Spain or Spain Rodriguez, was an American underground cartoonist who created the character Trashman. His experiences on the road with the biker gang, the Road Vultures, provided inspiration for his work, as did his left-wing politics.
Early life
Manuel Rodriguez was born March 2, 1940 in Buffalo, New York. 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. Rodriguez studied at the Silvermine Guild Art School in New Caanan, Connecticut. 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).
A founder of the United Cartoon Workers of America, he contributed to numerous underground comics and also drew Salon's continuing graphic story, The Dark Hotel.
Strongly influenced by 1950s EC 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.