About Fierro

Fierro

Fierro was a comics magazine first published in Buenos Aires in September 1984 as Fierro a fierro. Historietas para sobrevivientes — comics for survivors. It was directed by Andrés Cascioli, with Juan Sasturain as editor-in-chief, and published by Ediciones de la Urraca, based in Buenos Aires, in the Buenos Aires (CABA) region of Argentina. A landmark of Argentine comics, it completed 100 issues by December 1992 and became a cult title; it was revived in 2006 with the newspaper Página/12, after its first epoch closed in 1992.

Comics for Survivors

Fierro's subtitle was a programme. Historietas para sobrevivientes addressed a country emerging from the 1976–1983 military dictatorship, whose citizens had quite literally survived state terror, censorship and economic crisis. The magazine appeared in September 1984, less than a year after the restoration of democracy, from Ediciones de la Urraca — the publisher of the satirical magazine Humor, which had itself resisted the dictatorship with unusual courage. Under director Andrés Cascioli, with Juan Sasturain as editor-in-chief, Fierro proposed that comics could be the art form of that survival: adult, literary, politically awake and formally free.

The complete name, Fierro a fierro, was taken from an old gaucho comic by Raúl Roux published in Patoruzito. The word fierro is creole Spanish for iron, aligning the magazine with the international metal generation of Métal Hurlant and Heavy Metal, and it evokes Martín Fierro, José Hernández's national poem. National tradition, popular toughness and international modernity were all claimed in a single word.

The First Issue and Its Ambition

The cover of the first issue was drawn by Oscar Chichoni, who made covers for the magazine on numerous occasions; its image presented a mix of eroticism and technology, body and machine, announcing a science-fiction and adult orientation far from the family kiosk comics of the Columba tradition. Inside, the magazine's aim was to gather the best of Argentine and international production, in addition to giving space to new authors.

That double aim defined its hundred issues. Fierro published established masters of the Argentine historieta beside newcomers, European material beside local work, and criticism and essays beside stories. The opening issue carried the first instalment of La Argentina en pedazos, Ricardo Piglia's series pairing his essays on Argentine literature with comics adaptations — a declaration, in the magazine's first pages, that the historieta would be treated as a vehicle for the country's serious literary culture, and that the violence running through that literature, one year after the dictatorship's end, was its subject.

Finding New Authors

In 1984 the magazine ran a contest, Fierro busca a dos manos — Fierro seeks two hands. The winner in the drawing category was a fifteen-year-old artist from Rosario who signed as Max Cachimba; the writing category was won by Pablo De Santis. Both continued publishing in the magazine, first together and then independently, Cachimba developing his own scripts and De Santis working with other cartoonists. The contest became a founding legend of the magazine because it proved its promise was real: unknown teenagers could enter Argentine comics through Fierro's pages.

In 1985 Fierro began to include the supplement Óxido, extending its range, and that same year it won the prize for best comics magazine at the fifth Barcelona International Comics Convention — international recognition, within a year of launch, of what the Buenos Aires magazine had achieved.

Series and Creators

Fierro's hundred issues serialised work that reshaped Argentine comics. Its best-documented glories include Perramus, a dystopian story of an amnesiac survivor in a fascist city, recognised internationally as a masterpiece of political comics. The magazine's pages in its first epoch were the natural home of the generation that Trillo, Sasturain and their collaborators represented: writers and artists treating genre — science fiction, crime, war, the fantastic — as a means of examining Argentine reality after the dictatorship.

Because Fierro mixed Argentine and international production, its readers encountered the world bande dessinée tradition in the same pages as local work, at a moment when Argentina was reconnecting culturally with the world after years of isolation. That cosmopolitanism, joined to an unmistakably Argentine editorial voice, was the magazine's signature.

A Cult Title of the Democratic Restoration

The seed record calls Fierro a cult title, and its cultural position supports the word. It was never a mass-circulation Columba-style weekly; it was the magazine of a generation of readers, creators and critics for whom comics were a serious art. It completed 100 issues by December 1992 — a round, documented total for its first epoch, including, across the run, anthology books and special editions on Argentine comics authors as well as supplements in some numbers.

Its influence exceeded its circulation. Writers such as Pablo De Santis passed from its contest to national literary careers; its critical writing, including Laura Vázquez's later reviews collected from the field it helped create, treated the historieta as an object of scholarship; and its model of the adult comics magazine shaped every serious Argentine attempt that followed.

The End of the First Epoch

Fierro's first epoch closed in December 1992, with its hundredth issue. The closure belonged to the economics of the early 1990s in Argentina: a sophisticated monthly magazine for a specialised readership was exposed to paper costs, currency turbulence and a small domestic market, however strong its reputation. The magazine had survived the post-dictatorship euphoria and the hyperinflation of 1989; the stabilised but import-flooded market of the new decade ended it.

The closure was understood at the time as the end of an era rather than the failure of a title. Fierro had demonstrated its thesis — that Argentina could sustain a comics magazine of international quality, edited in Buenos Aires, mixing the best local and foreign work — for eight years and one hundred issues.

Revival with Página/12

Fierro was revived in 2006 with the newspaper Página/12, as the seed record notes. The revival returned the title to newsstands as a companion to one of Argentina's leading newspapers, reuniting it with the generation of readers and creators formed in the 1980s and presenting new Argentine comics under the historic name. The revived magazine confirmed the original's standing: more than a decade after its closure, Fierro remained the title under which serious Argentine comics were expected to appear.

This profile concerns the magazine as a whole, with its documented spine in the first epoch of 1984–1992 and its 2006 revival. Detailed publication data for the revival's full run was not available in the sources consulted, and none is invented here.

Place in Argentine Comics History

Argentine comics history is usually told in three acts: the golden age of the 1940s–1960s, the revivalist professionalism of Skorpio in the 1970s, and the adult, literary renewal that Fierro led in the 1980s. Fierro's distinction within that story is that it joined artistic ambition to a national moment. No other Argentine magazine so completely embodied the cultural meaning of the democratic restoration — its subtitle, its publisher's anti-dictatorship pedigree, its opening series on violence in Argentine literature, and its discovery of teenage newcomers all belonged to the same gesture.

Legacy

Fierro's legacy is the modern Argentine historieta itself. It proved that comics in Argentina could be adult, literary and internationally decorated without ceasing to be popular art; it launched creators, won the Barcelona prize in 1985, and set the standard by which later magazines were judged. Its hundred first-epoch issues are collected, studied and reprinted, and its name remains, through the Página/12 revival, a living one.

For a directory of Argentine magazines, Fierro stands as the landmark comics magazine of post-dictatorship Buenos Aires: created by Andrés Cascioli and Juan Sasturain for Ediciones de la Urraca in September 1984, closed at its height of reputation in December 1992, and revived in 2006 — the magazine of comics for survivors, written by a country that had become one.

Fierro's example also reshaped what Argentine readers expected from a comics magazine as physical object and cultural statement. Its covers, supplements, anthology books and special editions treated each issue as something to be kept rather than discarded, at a time when most Argentine comics were printed to be thrown away. That shift toward the collectable, durable magazine anticipated the album and graphic-novel culture that later dominated serious comics publishing in Argentina, and collectors' preservation of complete Fierro runs is one reason its hundred first-epoch issues can still be studied as a coherent editorial project.