Rafael Navarro
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens Sept. 22 and boasts a broad array of art reflecting the tastes of George Lucas, who has been collecting art for 50 years. One of the pieces featured in the Comics Gallery is Rafael Navarro’s “Sonámbulo: Mexican Stand-Off” from his “Lucha Noir” comic.
Sonámbulo celebrates his 30th anniversary this year, and Navarro will be at his Comic-Con Booth 2107 to sign, discuss and draw.
Rafael Navarro
“Sonámbulo is a former masked Mexican wrestler who resides now as a private eye, but he’s more of a paranormal investigator hunting monsters,” Navarro explained. “Because he has the ability to read people’s dreams in a very surrealistic Buñuel-esque, Fellini sort of way, he realizes that the monsters that he may be hunting may not be exactly the monsters that everybody claims to be. They might be just victims of circumstances.”
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With the character Sonámbulo, Navarro created a genre known as lucha noir.
“Basically, hard-boiled detective stories, but with a masked Mexican wrestler touch to it,” Navarro added. “In many ways, Sonámbulo, to me, he’s basically Mexican Robert Mitchum. He’s like Philip Marlowe and Pancho Villa all at the same time but with some weird, strange supernatural power.”
Navarro said his character is a celebration of everything he loves.
“Mexico, film noir, German Expressionism, Mexican cinema, surrealistic dream things, imagery,” Navarro said. “It’s like making a burrito, all your favorite ingredients in one big giant burrito, you know, for you to enjoy.”
Ryan Linkof, Senior curator of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, contacted Navarro during the pandemic about including Sonámbulo.
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“I initially reached out just because I loved the series and the work is so great,” Linkof said. “It has so many connections to our collection, not just because it’s comics, but it has this kind of detective pulp quality, and we also have that kind of material in the collection, work that was made for detective pulps in the ’40s and ’50s. So it has a nice visual corollary to some of that work.”
Navarro said, “The painting that was acquired by the Lucas Museum was issue 3 of ‘Mexican Stand-Off.’ Basically, the most visually depicted form of the term Mexican standoff for me. It’s basically Sonámbulo holding back the living dead with two .45 automatics.”
The museum also archived 32 pages from the first issue.
“It’s important for us to have it in the collection to show the world, to create that opportunity for people to encounter the original artwork,” Linkoff added. “So we often kind of think of comics as these ephemeral things even though comic books themselves are of course collectibles, but the original artwork, seeing the kind of hand of the the artist, is something that the museum can uniquely offer.”
Navarro said he is thrilled to have the comic in the museum archives.
“I feel more honored now because they’re officially archiving it,” Navarro said. “And I’m hoping for other generations to enjoy them as I have enjoyed the work in my hands. And hopefully it’ll inspire others to do the same.”
“Absolutely,” Linkof confirmed. “I think that’s so foundational and important to the founders, especially this idea of inspiration, that this museum is really providing a space to to look at this artwork, celebrate this artwork, but also to inspire people through it. And as someone who’s an independent comic artist, Rafael Navarro, he really produced this on his own. I think that’s an enormous inspiration for a lot of people, that you can sit down and produce something like that that has a long impact and has a 30-year lifespan and find yourself at Comic-Con with your own booth.”
And what does the future hold for Navarro and his character?
“A couple of friends of mine and I in the industry, we’ve been trying to make a Sonámbulo film/animation project for the longest time,” Navarro stated. “It’s all, you know, always the bridesmaid, never the bride sort of situation. It’s been imagined in some form or some way.”
You can see Navarro’s bold, dynamic work when the museum opens on Sept. 22. You can also see some of his original art and comics at his Comic-Con booth through Sunday.
