The field and the end of the century Mexican comic strip

Abstract

In this article, the cultural and comic book dynamics in Mexico in the eighties and nineties were examined, taking up the category of field, from Pierre Bourdieu's theory of domination. An analogy of the field of comics with that of soccer was made, in order to describe and analyze the complexity of the sociocultural movements involved in the struggles for symbolic and economic capital.

This qualitative-interpretative work, based on the analysis of primary and secondary documentation, arouses from the argument that in Mexico, while the industrial comics were in decline, the author comics were flourishing. This argument is based on the fact that, while companies such as Editorial Vid, Novaro and Novedades were governed by business strategies such as reissuing national material and importation of foreign comics; the author's comic was emerging, inspired by the European and North American comic. It was found that, in the decades of study, the cultural panorama was modified by the implantation of the neoliberal model, which introduced multiple cultural products, that, therefore, transformed Mexican cultural consumption and gave industrial comics a competition which it could not win. As a conclusion, it is proposed that, despite the fact that the industrial comics fell into decline due to lack of adaptation strategies, the same factors allowed the creators of the author's comic to enrich themselves with new influences, that led them to generate adult, critical works linked to their environment.