'El Tecnico'

The work I'm doing on El Tecnico deserves it's own record!

Subject matter, themes and style

Mexican wrestling and luchadores generally, 'El Santo' specifically have fascinated me for a long time. These cultural phenomena are powerful, not only because of the visual and cultural significance, but also because they occupy a grey area between 'high' and 'low' art as well a tension between American and Mexican pop culture. It's an uncomplicated fight between the good guys (technicos) and the bad guys (rudos). In the El Santo cinematic universe, the bad guys have been expanded to encompass classic American horror tropes, monsters, mummies, witches and standard James Bond inspired evil villains.

Stylistically, the simplification of the El Santo universe matches well with the simplicity and exaggeration of art from two of my favorite IPs, Mike Mignolas' Hellboy and Moby Franke's characters from Team Fortress. Both are purely about action and fun. Visual subtlety and nuance are not a thing, since they don't serve the goal of the IP, but the art is highly crafted and intentional. The visual worlds rely on simple, strong shape and color languages to create emersion vs high detail, high cost assets.

El Tecnico is a variation on El Santo, simply a more purely lone wolf, action hero with some visual ties to his past as a wrestler. The glamour of James Bond, the technical expertise of a special operator or Jason Bourne and maybe a little bit of Vincente Fernandez, in that order are all combined to exist in the Acapulco of 1970.