A lone wolf taxi driver takes the law into his own hands as he patrols the bleak streets of 1980s Spain. Part Dick Tracy, part Taxi Driver, but wholly unpredictable, cartoonist Marti’s freewheeling crime tales first appeared in monthly installments in a Spanish counterculture magazine called El Vibora. This new collection compiles the complete stories in English for the first time, offering a scintillating glimpse into the blossoming of Spanish artistic freedom in the aftermath of Franco’s fascist dictatorship.
Buy The Cabbie: Definitive EditionThe first story finds Cabbie chasing after his father’s coffin, stolen by baddies as vengeance for his constant vigilantism. But that’s not the weirdest thing: the coffin had actually been stored at Cabbie’s familial home for 22 years, since his father’s dying wish was to remain near his wife and son. Oh, and Cabbie’s mother reveals that it also contains Cabbie’s inheritance, making for an even more crucial chase.
As he patrols the area on the hunt for the coffin, he encounters all manner of bizarre characters, including deformed villains right out of Chester Gould’s fevered mind and a deranged teen girl so zonked out she blithely wanders around unclothed. Marti’s plot seems to develop on the fly, as if he just churned out whatever came to mind before each monthly magazine deadline, giving the stories a hallucinatory feel as we ricochet from one stop to the next on his demented taxi ride.
The second story finds Cabbie trying to get back to his normal routine, thrilled that his first fare is a Kuwaiti diplomat, at least until that diplomat is immediately assassinated in his back seat. Thus begins another series of bizarre adventures including blackmail sex tapes (again involving the teen girl), a new cab agency with elite customers and armored cabs, and a new love interest for our antihero. Through it all, Cabbie takes it as it comes and doles out retribution on his own terms, a dapper vigilante operating by his unique moral code.
Marti’s black-and-white artwork is super polished, with clean, assured lines that look more like mainstream newspaper comics than scruffy underground work. In fact, the panel layouts are generally arranged in three-panel strips, four strips to a page, furthering the newspaper comic feel. His creativity is on full display in both his unforgettable character designs and his Lynchian story scenarios, exposing the gritty underbelly of urban crime. It’s a loco trip on the wild side, and a fascinating slice of post-Franco artistic freedom.
