Welcome Bienvenidos
 Frida Kahlo, Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, Nikolas Muray Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin .  This
is Frida's house, the focal point of many of our adventures. Those of
you that have visited the Frida Khalo Museum in Coyoacan, Mexico will
probably recognize it, even though the walls are gray-scale instead of cobalt blue and the roof tiles are not terra cotta. The wooden framed house below, Frida inherited from her long lost uncle Otto, along with a vast fortune... you're right, Otto is a fictitious character!... Did you know that her dad's real name was Wilhelm, not Guillermo, which he changed!?  | Frida Khalo's Self-Portrait With Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird
is undoubtedly the greatest image schemata that has influenced and
directed the core story-line that the comic images are trying to
portray in Frida's Monkey.
Frida Khalo along with her husband, the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera,
lived a rich social life which entailed close relationships with a
myriad of famous artists and notable persons of their time. In Frida's
Monkey, creative license has embellished Frida's friendships with an
array of historic personages, not limited solely to artists from her
time e.g. Vincent van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.. Frida's
Monkey takes place in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S., yet is also
connected to other cities, states, as well as provinces north and south
of the U.S., as the continuing adventures will disclose. Frida and
Diego's lives were full of scandal and insidious politics; the Frida
portrayed here, along with her friends, live their lives in a reality
that instead opts to focus on the arts, humor, and the ironies of life. Every attempt is made to avoid getting a laugh via base humor or a least common denominator. You will undoubtedly note that Frida's Monkey displays an obvious obsession with history and literature. It is with great relish that such "props" are used herein, and it is not that we go "back-in-time" but that history comes to life "again." Furthermore, every attempt is made not to take historic names in vain, as is the modern commercial tendency; but instead, as in the case of Frida's black cat Mephistopheles, the name remains for the most part not far removed from Goethe's fabled character (with the evil twice-removed). Frida's
Monkey is produced as a bilingual, Spanish/English comic, partly
intended as a medium that aims at educating readers to learn and
understand languages and cultures other than their own. Translating
from English to Spanish, and vice-versa, can rarely be effectively
accomplished via a computer generated translation program, especially
when a multiple-meaning punchline is involved. The task at hand is one
of keeping both languages, story-lines, humor, and punchlines as
meaningful and parallel to the desired outcome as possible. |
