Tex - Matador, review: flash of the blade

Tex - Matador, review

Among the Sergio Bonelli Editore Christmas gifts that arrived on the shelves of bookstores and comic shops, there is Tex - Matador signed by Mauro Boselli and Aldo Capitanio. This is the traditional volume in deluxe format dedicated to Tex which this year reissues, in color, the monthly Tex 488 and Tex 489 issues respectively of June and July 2001. The story in question is attributable to the ranger's group of Mexican stories but at the same time it has an “exotic” setting using the bullfighting backdrop for the events.

Tex - Matador

Tex - Matador, flash of the blade

Tex and Carson cross the Texas border, for one of their rare pleasure visits, and land in Mexico to visit the Montales friend. The invitation is corroborated not only by the promise of a fiesta and muchachitas dancing for Carson, but also by the prospect of attending a unique show: the bullfight. In fact, the young and spectacular matador Rafael Guerrero has arrived in Guadalupe who is waiting to face the fierce bull Huracán in the arena.

Montales manages to make the two pards Rafael meet, a young man with an affable manner and anything but intoxicated by celebrity, before the show which they then actually witness from the stands, being very impressed by the ritual that contrasts man and animal. But just outside the city walls there is little to celebrate: the Montoya brothers, cruel and unscrupulous landowners, attack a stagecoach, thus recovering Elvira, their sister and guilty of having a relationship with the matador.

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Thus begins a mad chase in which Tex and Carson they separate, trying to hit the enemy on two fronts before he entrenches himself, and whose epilogue is consumed, as easily understood, right at the Montoya ranch and in an arena for an improvised and potentially deadly bullfight but herald of incredible revelations about the past of Montoya himself and above all on the origins of Rafael.

Tex - Matador, like a Hollywood classic

With Tex - Matador, Mauro Boselli ideally pays tribute both to a certain classic Hollywood cinema, not necessarily John Ford's classic western which still hovers above all in the central part of the volume, and to one of the many passions of Sergio Bonelli himself, namely the bullfight that had already captured the imagination of others illustrious men like Ernest Hemingway.

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Tex - Matador Thematically instead, Tex - Matador's breath is that of a great Hollywood classic of the golden age, both of films set in the world of bullfights, such as those starring Tyrone Power for example, and of those in which the honor and moral temper of the protagonist are the masters. And here is the ideal link from this point of view with John Ford's western and with Tex, his "direct" emanation that cannot resist the indirect request for help from Rafael Guerrero, an upright young man who does not hesitate to defend the honor of the beloved woman.

Aldo Capitanio's pencils with a classical and rigorous approach contribute to the glossy atmosphere, if we can say so, that pervades the volume. The designer had worked for Il Giornalino (among other things on the comic book adaptations of Salgari's novels) and then on the project of La Storia d'Italia a Fumetti, arriving at Sergio Bonelli Editore at the end of the 1980s and then signing l 'eighth Texone (entitled The Comanche Soldier).

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Tex - Matador Also noteworthy is the excellent work in the colors of GFB Comics that he finds an effective palette from the very first pages made of colors pervaded by the sun and the reflections of the Mexican sun. Browns, ocher and grays that contrast well first with the colors of the bullfight (red and gold) then with Tex's yellow shirt, in the second part of the volume, and then with the torches in the light of which the epilogue is consumed of history.

The volume

As mentioned at the beginning, Tex - Matador is a 22 × 31 cm deluxe hardcover volume. The graphic design is the traditional one of these volumes: great space for the cover illustration by Claudio Villa and the distinctive red rib. The graphic rendering is excellent also thanks to the choice of an opaque and porous paper that is well suited to the stroke of Aldo Capitanio and to the palette of colors chosen by GFB Comics. Excluding the important format, reading is easy thanks to an excellent thread binding and a very precise trimming of the pages that avoids rash opening of the volume itself.

Tex - Matador The volume is embellished by a very full-bodied apparatus editorial placed at the opening of the volume. In fact, there are two river editorials signed respectively by Graziano Frediani and Luca Barbieri: the first is linked to the fascination that bullfighting has had on Sergio Bonelli and the influence that that way has had on literature and cinema; the second, on the other hand, is of a "technical" nature and explains the bullfight in detail so as not to leave the reader bewildered when faced with specific situations and terminologies then mentioned in the course of history itself. At the end of the editorial system, the inevitable biographies of the authors and creators of Tex.