EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 20 © 2017 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

96 From The Inside: David vs. Goliath Plagiarism or paranoia? The strange and tragic tale of Joaquín Blázquez Garcés and a film about a certain extra-terrestrial. Joaquín Blázquez Garcés began working for comic books at the tender age of 13, for the Bardon agency in Barcelona. Later, through Selecciones Illustradas, another Spanish art agency, he worked for the Warren horror magazines. Influenced by Luis García, Blázquez would take over the ‘Mummy’ saga (begun by Brocal Remohi) for three more adventures, drawing it in a hyperrealistic, photo-referenced style (for which Blázquez would often use himself as model). After his work at Warren, Blázquez suffered the first of many breakdowns which kept him out of work from comics during the 1980s. It was in 1982 that Blázquez, like many other people, discovered the film E.T. In contrast to many viewers, it wasn’t the whimsical tear-jerking film that touched his heart, but rather the fact that the extra-terrestrial character looked a lot like one he had drawn many years earlier for a horror comics magazine. The story in question was ‘Then One Foggy Christmas Eve’ written by Gerry Boudreau and published in Vampirella number 49 (cover dated March 1976). It too featured an alien creature, looking very much like the one in the later movie, though unlike that one, Blázquez’s was an evil entity. But still, the similarities were there. As any artist who is convinced his work has been swiped, he wrote the makers of the film a letter about the “mysterious” coincidence. The first letter was actually quite polite, wherein he said that he admired the filmmaker’s work, but incidentally the character in his film looked a lot like one he (Blázquez) had drawn many years earlier for an American magazine. The fact that Blázquez wrote the letter himself, and in English, a language he didn’t master, made it all the more remarkable. Needless to say, Blázquez’s letter never got a reply, although he kept sending letters so that his work would be acknowledged as having been used as reference to create the alien creature for that popular children’s sci-fi film from the early ’80s. Since Blázquez never got a reply, he began a lawsuit, for which he had to hock all his possessions and sell his artwork as well. The news attracted the Spanish comics magazine Cimoc , and its publisher asked Blázquez to re- draw the story for them again (to avoid any copyright infringement), and gave him the front cover to do a painting of his ‘version’ of the character, but it was to no avail. Blázquez spent the few remaining years of his life fighting for his rights, eventually succumbing at the age of 40 to a brain haemorrhage in 1986, due to his consumption and abuse of alcohol and pills. The case would have ended there, if it weren’t that, in 2009, a documentary about Blázquez and his lawsuit was put into production by one of Blázquez’s neighbours. The documentary would include interviews with various artists and comic experts, both Spanish and foreign. Nevertheless, to finish the project, the producers were in need of some funding (this was done years before Kickstarter). A website and blog had been created where you could find information and see extracts of the documentary (mainly street scenes shot in New York in which people were shown the drawings Blázquez had done and asked if they knew what it was; most answering that it was E.T., an evil-looking E.T.). Nonetheless, a couple of years later the website and blog dedicated to the documentary and lawsuit were removed from the internet, and mysteriously vanished, along with the film. To this day the outcome of the lawsuit and the fate of the documentary remain unknown. l © Norma