by mariana marcaletti
Herald staff

Comic writer and cartoonist Max Aguirre is not gripped by comic heroes that embody powerful forces or who live adventures in faraway lands. On the contrary, he is attracted to apparently meaningless human beings who make mistakes, have flaws and are likely to mess things up a little bit such as Peter Sellers in Blake Edwards’ The Party, Bill Murray in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation or the main characters in the US sitcoms Seinfeld or Friends.
Instead of connecting his comic Jim, Jam y el Otro with the medium’s tradition, Aguirre points out that there is a huge influence of television, in general, and US sitcoms, in particular, in his work. “I Love Lucy or The Dick Van Dyke Show, US comedies I used to watch when I was a kid, have affected my way of telling stories, as far as the passage from television to comics allows. Of course, I try to be faithful to my personal style, I try to do it in my own manner without resorting to something completely foreign. I wanted to deal with some topics that are frequently seen in sitcoms,” Max Aguirre says to the Herald. Some of his concerns — that can be spotted both in sitcoms and his comics — are the difference between “cool” people and the so-called “losers,” career prospects, love affairs, family relationships in their everyday environment, bordering on the absurd, the ridiculous and yet what must be seriously considered.
“‘Real’ characters make us search for explanations to everyday episodes that we cannot understand. Under some circumstances, we don’t seem to have the right solution. There are awkward moments that we all pretend don’t happen to us, we don’t talk about these things, but our life is full of gags. We identify with it because we can relate to it. For example, when you go to the bathroom in somebody else’s house and the toilet doesn’t work, you feel embarrassed: we are much more ridiculous than we think.”
In his book Jim, Jam y el Otro, Aguirre presents three characters that match his description of “real” people: clumsy, frustrated, ugly and aimless friends share a life together and watch scenes go by with them incapable of changing a single aspect of their fate. “Jim, Jam y el Otro is about questioning the Ying and Yang theory. I have never bought that really, although it is valid and respectable. In general terms, we are a lot of people walking on the grey side. So, the good and the bad as two completely different aspects do not exist, and it’s not true that we all carry inside a nice and a bad person. We are all grey, dark grey, light grey and we try to keep some balance.”
Unlike many comics titled with the particular names of the character such as Quino’s Mafalda, Tute’s Batu, Roberto “Negro” Fontanarrosa’s Inodoro Pereyra, Jim, Jam y el otro gets rid of names. “I was searching for a title that would be different from the classic comic title, I wanted to jump the game’s rules, so that you don’t know who is who and I chose ‘El otro’ because of (Jacques) Lacan, the psychoanalist, who talks about the other.”
Life: a bargaining table. A particular characteristic of the book is that it can be read from the beginning to the end or backwards, depending on your preferences. Although it doesn’t follow a chronological order, the story can be understood perfectly because it consists of a juxtaposition of anecdotes that make perfect sense when the reader puts them together. The pieces of the puzzle that must be ordered are the moments of the characters’ life: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. This way, through personal biographies, we get to see the history of a generation.
“They belong to my generation, from the 70s, so when they are kids they play the games I used to play such as the Simonkis and they would watch Titanes en el ring,” giving a wink to thirtysomethings about a shared background of hobbies and customs. A funny piece that exhibits this connection between the old and the new is when one character is asked by a boy if videogames existed when he was a kid. The first idea that pops into his head is tetris so he answers that, actually, videogames as known today belong to the present.
The writer also resorts to the child characters to express his opinion against a society modelled by adults. “Perhaps I take advantage of the kids and I make them say lines that are my own perspective on some issues. In a comic strip, one of the characters asks his mother how babies come to the world, and she replies that babies are the result of a couple who loves each other very much. The boy then asks: why does my aunt have a baby if she doesn’t love anyone? And his mother punishes him. It’s both hilarious and hypocritical.”
The convergence between kids, teens, adults and old people in the same book helps Aguirre to develop a lifetime and shows the shifts that occur as times passes. “At the end of the day, we are that: the bargaining table between what we want to be and what we end up being. We must elaborate on the mourning of what we must leave behind and couldn’t achieve but we ought to also avoid staying still. In a healthy way, life beats you. I say in a healthy way because if you are too worried about what might happen to you, then nothing happens to you and that’s terrible. Living is complex. It is good to good reflect on it and on the empty words that adults tell children, who they underestimate. On the contrary, children are clever and have some kind of collateral thought that shows their lack of social indoctrination, then they get tamed later.”
The process of domestication, in Aguirre’s perspective, also involves adopting some rules such as lying to make somebody happy and hiding your true feelings. “What am I in your life?”, a girl asks her boyfriend. He says  she is nothing but an infatuation, a one-night stand so she gets pissed off and dumps him.
“Oscar Wilde says that the day when he finally decides to speak his mind, all he will get is huge loneliness in return. To some extent, I believe there is a part of hypocrisy that is the base of society. We wouldn’t resist the truth. There are lies we all agree on, and some of them we don’t even discuss because it would take ages to reach an agreement such as ‘healthy envy’, ‘friends in the good and bad times,’ they are common-places that belong to the popular wisdom”.
Old but not wiser. Despite his relative youth (he is 37), Aguirre is particularly concerned about getting old and wasted, he explains. This is the reason why he has come up with the elderly characters, a trio that can easily represent the traits of many old people.
“Something happens when you are about to turn 40: you start looking differently at old age. We tend to avoid thinking  about the approach of old times although we all know we will eventually some day get old and die, but we do not openly assume it. On the other hand, we empathize with losers. We like to be on their side. I am on the side of losers, the ones who don’t feel comfortable, who don’t have a good time. I share an allegiance with them, although they don’t give me any extra benefit. The old characters have many things to lose, they depend on other people, they are weak, nobody wants to be old because it is not a ranking and it is a lie that the older you get, the wiser you are. ‘We all carry an old person on our back,’ (Joan Manuel) Serrat says, and I agree”.
Max Aguirre believes the deeply-rooted belief that runs that old age brings wisdom is nonsense. “I think it is an attempt to justify a state, to give a benefit to the elderly. The main syllogism supported by our capitalist society is the one that states that you cannot do something unless it has an expected profit. So, it is easy to say nice phrases and when an old man comes and tells you something, you ask him to shut up. And it is also a lie, we can acquire experience if we live life, but wisdom doesn’t show up per se.”