As a trenchant critic of the government (from a radical left-wing position), he often faced official displeasure and harassment. The context of Mexican political realities and a comic book industry that saw itself as a part of the entertainment industry, made Rius’s comics unique. He is credited with helping to educate a whole generation of Mexicans as they followed the adventures of the laid-back electric-blanket wearing Indian Calzonzin and his tussles with the village PRI party boss, Don Perpetuo Del Rosal. Rius is perhaps the first cartoonist to seriously consider the balance needed in order to make educational comics work, to include enough action, rounded characters and humour to draw in readers and keep them turning the pages. Apart from a political conscience-raising, he used these comic-books to promote vegetarianism, Buddhism, family planning and the joys of stamp collecting. Both these comic books are set in fictional Mexican villages and use stock characters to explain the political and economic reality of life. This tendency begins to manifest in the 1960s with his two seminal comic books Los Agachados (the stooped ones) and later, Los Supermachos (the super machos). His professional trajectory is unique in that he has concentrated his efforts on non-fiction works, specifically educational comic books. Eduardo Del Rio is a legendary Mexican cartoonist who has been publishing books, comics and press cartoons for over fifty years.
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