Chapter 10

REWRITING AND VISUALIZING THE CID:

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF MEDI­EVAL GENDER
AND RACE IN ARGENTINIAN GRAPHIC NOVELS

REBECCA DE SOUZA

This essay compares the modern rewriting and visualizing of the medi­eval
Castilian epic Poema de mio Cid (PMC) in two as-yet unstudied Argentinian ­graphic
novels: Cantar de mio Cid (2012) (CMC) written by Manuel Morini and illustrated by
Ivan Jacob,1 and Mio Cid (2018) (MC) written by Alejandro Farias, illustrated by Antonio
Acevedo and coloured by Nicolás Á� vila. Both are creative manifestations of neomedi­
evalism; a lens that is yet to be applied to Latin American comics. Here I understand
neomedi­evalism in the same way in which Haydock previously defined medi­evalism, as
“a discourse of contingent representations derived from the historical Middle Ages, com-
posed of marked alterities to and continuities with the present.”2 Though scholars have
attempted to distinguish medi­evalism from neomedi­evalism based upon to what extent
a modern recreation of the medi­eval is “fictionalized” or “fantastical,” such as Richard
Utz and KellyAnn Fitzpatrick,3 this distinction is ultimately untenable and imprecise,
particularly when dealing with creative forms alien to the Middle Ages including cinema
and ­graphic novels. An element of visual creativity or fantasy is unavoidable in g­ raphic
novels, though the story might explicitly rewrite medi­eval precedent. Nadia Altschul has
also made a cogent case for neomedi­evalism over medi­evalism in this volume, given its
Anglocentric origins and confusing conflation with medi­eval studies. I thus consider
these ­graphic novels neomedi­evalist recreations, though I nevertheless write as a medi­
evalist familiar with the earliest extant version of the story found in PMC. This article
will therefore explore how this earlier text has been transformed as well as how its
resultant recreations in the ­graphic novel form react to their modern Argentinian con-
text of reception. This approach is informed by Gérard Genette’s framework of intertex-
tual relationships: the earliest extant version of the PMC (ca. 1207) is explicitly denoted

1 The Poema de mio Cid is more commonly known as the Cantar de mio Cid in Argentina, following
the title given to the poem by foundational Spanish philo­logist Ramón Menéndez Pidal. Here I refer
to the medi­eval text as Poema de mio Cid (PMC), following Colin Smith’s edition (1972), and use
Cantar de mio Cid (CMC) to refer to the 2012 g­ raphic novel only.
2 Nickolas Haydock, “Medi­evalism and Excluded Middles,” 19.
3 For Fitzpatrick, neomedi­evalism is “a form of medi­evalism: a post-medi­eval imagining or
appropriation of the Middle Ages” (Fitzpatrick, Neomedi­evalism, xviii) which for Utz “most
insouciantly obliterate history and historical accuracy and replace history-based narratives with
simulacra of the medi­eval” (“Coming to Terms,” 107). See also Louise D’Arcens (“Introduction”) on
this provisional distinction between the two terms.
174 Chapter 10

in both cases as the hypotext upon which the ­graphic novels are grafted, as hypertextual
reworkings that have the capacity for transformation as well as imitation.4
The two ­graphic novels sit at the fascinating intersection of two sociocultural situ-
ations: as postcolonial afterlives of a colonizer’s literary history on the one hand, and
ideo­logically transformed neomedi­evalisms on the other. They remember and recast
a literary history that is not quite Argentina’s, but a history indelibly connected to the
formation of the modern nation state. By rewriting and visually reimagining a canoni-
cal European text—already accessible in multiple editions printed in Argentina—in a
novel, modern form, the authors and artists implicitly approach a new audience and
even border on explicit didacticism. PMC is thus made accessible to a younger audience
appealed by products of mass-cultural reproduction which mediate meaning through
the familiar visual tropes and textual techniques of the comic book form. A tension
does however emerge between the accessibility of CMC and MC to a twenty-first cen-
tury Argentinian audience and their recourse to an inherently simplified reconfigura-
tion of the story of the Cid of PMC, which involves a heightening of gender difference as
well as a colonialist and Orientalist othering of Semitic identities. The ideo­logical con-
tent of the works is thus wholly modern and, I argue, legitimates a neoliberal myth of
modern Argentinian ‘progress’ versus a purportedly ‘backwards’ Iberian Middle Ages,
a trope that originated in Argentinian political discourse of the nineteenth century.
Before assessing the content of the novels, it is necessary to situate them in their
sociopolitical context—that is, twenty-first century postcolonial Argentina—and con-
sider what role the Iberian and indeed the European Middle Ages has to play in this
society and its cultural production. I will then consider the history and relevance of
the ­graphic novel form itself, what status it holds in Argentina’s society and who might
be the intended audience of these works, before engaging with the ways in which CMC
and MC transform their hypotext(s) and how in doing so they mediate and process
contemporary social and political issues.

Political, Literary, and Academic (Neo)Medi­evalisms in Argentina

The vision of the Iberian Middle Ages presented by CMC and MC is inflected by multi-
ple literary, historio­graphical, and sociopolitical discourses formulated in Argentina
from the nineteenth century to the present. Given the g­ raphic narratives recast a his-
torical literary text of Argentina’s colonizer—a text so canonical that it often functions
as metonymy for an entire period defined by intercultural interaction across religious
and racial frontiers—it is essential to pay particular attention to the mechanisms of
racial and cultural identity in Argentina as a post- yet also settler-colonial context
and how this interacts with the reimagining of medi­eval Iberia in Argentinian moder-
nity. The Iberian Middle Ages were in fact overtly denigrated in the political discourse
of the post-independence era from 1816 onwards. Nadia Altschul has used settler
post-colonial theory to demonstrate how for liberal reformers in nineteenth century
Spanish America many of society’s ills were blamed on the “medi­eval remnants” of

4 Genette, Palimpsests, 26.

 Rewriting and Visualizing the Cid 175

colonization.5 Former Argentinian president Domingo Sarmiento (1811–1888) pro-

posed Spain had “bequeathed to the colonies the medi­eval character it itself had at
the time of the conquest,”6 and instead pursued the discursive formation of a unique
Argentinian identity in his writings. As both Richard Gott and Altschul have shown,
Argentina can and must be considered a white settler colonial society that sought
the domination and extermination of indigenous peoples in the second half of the
nineteenth century.7 Aní�bal Quijano takes a postcolonial perspective and argues for an
epistemic dependency between Latin America and Europe, given the settler-colonists
of Latin America’s Southern Cone asserted their multifaceted European identities and
explicitly rejected “the identity associated with Latin America’s heritage and, in par-
ticular, any relationship with the indigenous population.”8
The promotion of a homogeneous, white-European formulation of Argentinian
identity at the expense of the indigenous population was also attempted through the
promotion of a national literary canon in the nineteenth century. José Hernández’s
epic poem of over two thousand lines, Martín Fierro (1872–1879), is an erudite appro-
priation of the popular gauchesque genre of oral poetry narrated on the pampas. Nel-
son González Ortega deems it “an individual aspiration of nationhood on the basis of
the unity of a common territory, language, religion and race,” one that excludes indig-
enous and black Argentinian citizens while romanticizing the lives of white peasant
farmers.9 Martín Fierro has on several occasions tellingly been linked to PMC which
was similarly attributed to an essential Spanish identity in nineteenth century nation-
alist academic discourse. Most notably Miguel de Unamuno insisted upon an analogy
between the medi­eval “Reconquista” purportedly pursued by the Cid and the colonial
war against the Mapuche Indians in the late nineteenth century, the obverse of which
was the glorification of white gaucho identity insinuated by the poem.10 The racializa-
tion of Argentinian identity directly after independence and the refusal to reckon with
this past until only recently implicitly influences the portrayal and consideration of the
heterogeneous, multicultural Iberian Middle Ages in the ­graphic novels in question.
Attitudes towards medi­eval Iberia and Spain more generally fluctuated into the
twentieth century: Franco’s dictatorship saw a promotion and resurgence of reaction-
ary hispanismo by conservatives in Argentina, though this cultural project was rejected
by the majority.11 José de Diego summarizes the long history of Argentinian anti-his-

5 Altschul, “Medi­evalism in Spanish America,” 161.

6 Altschul, “Medi­evalism in Spanish America,” 155.
7 Gott, “Latin America as a White Settler Society,” 285–87; Altschul, “Medi­evalism in Spanish
America,” 157–58.
8 Quijano, “Coloniality of Power,” 211.
9 González Ortega, “Literary Nationalism,” 184.
10 Unamuno declared approvingly that “aquellos gauchos son nuestros aventureros y el soplo que
anima a ese poema hermosí�simo en su misma monotoní�a es el soplo de nuestro viejo Cantar de mío
Cid, de nuestros primitivos romanceros” (Pagés Larraya, “Unamuno y la valoración crí�tica,” 358).
11 Rodrí�guez, “Los hispanismos en Argentina.”
176 Chapter 10

panismo, promoted by Borges amongst others in the twentieth century.12 Borges was
himself a keen medi­evalist, though his interest lay—perhaps unsurprisingly—with
Old English and Norse texts, the influence of which frequently found its way into his
writing.13 Unlike other white settler writers—from the US, Canada, South Africa, and
Australia, for example—Borges is however rarely considered from a thoroughly racial-
ized postcolonial perspective,14 which is essential for decoding his neomedi­evalism
and particularly his preference for its northern European manifestations. Borges did
however engage with Iberian neomedi­evalism in his writing: interestingly he chose
not to recreate literary legend but rather fictionalize an episode in the life of the
twelfth-century Muslim Andalusi philosopher Ibn Rushd, in the short story “La busca
de Averroes” (Averroes’s Search) (1947). Christina Civantos has convincingly argued
that it exhibits an Orientalist conception of Islam and “the abandonment of any hope
of knowing the other,”15 a telling indictment of postcolonial race relations in 1940s
Argentina, and one that undoubtedly speaks to the author’s position as a postcolonial
settler subject. The othering of medi­eval Iberia’s Semitic inhabitants as unknowable
is thus not only evident in the two ­graphic novels to be studied here but even earlier
in the most dominant figure of twentieth-century Argentinian literature. Maria Ruhl-
mann’s essay in this volume conversely argues that Borges’ story explores the inter-
imperial relationship between the medi­eval Islamicate empire and the modern Span-
ish one, and thus rejects hispanismo. Ruhlmann proves that the Iberian Middle Ages
are fertile ground for Argentinian writers to work through notions of midcoloniality
and cultural imperialism, as they continue to be in the ­graphic novels of the twenty-
first century.
Despite a growing anti-hispanismo in the literary sphere, Iberian medi­evalismo was
founded as an academic discipline in Argentinian universities in the early twentieth
century and continues to this day.16 The Instituto de Filo­logí�a was founded at the Uni-

12 De Diego, “El Hispanismo en Argentina.” Borges crafts a parodic yet scathing critique of both
European and Spanish literary hegemony in his short story Pierre Menard: Author of the Quixote
(1939). The story’s French narrator proposes that Cervantes’ masterpiece is in fact neither
an inevitable nor necessary part of literary history. Roberto González Echevarrí�a has cogently
summarize how the chief concern of Latin American literary production since the nineteenth
century has indeed been “the issue of the uniqueness of Latin America as a cultural, social and
political space from which to narrate” (González Echevarrí�a, Myth and Archive, 10).
13 Toswell, Borges the Unacknowledged Medi­evalist.
14 See, for example, Edward Watts’s use of settler postcolonialism as a reading strategy in
post-independence American Literature, and Alan Lawson on the place of the settler subject in
postcolonial theory (Watt, “Settler Postcolonialism”; Lawson, “Postcolonial Theory”). While Robin
Fiddian’s recent Postcolonial Borges is an engaging study of Borges’s postcolonial subjectivity
and how it manifests in attitudes towards collective identity-construction in his writing, neither
Borges’s settler-colonial identity nor concepts of race, alterity and indigeneity are discussed as
relevant contexts to his work (Fiddian, Postcolonial Borges).
15 Civantos, The Afterlife, 61.
16 See Gómez Moreno (Breve historia del medi­evalismo panhispánico, 143–48), for a chrono­logical
outline of academic medi­evalismo in Argentina, both philo­logical and historical.
 Rewriting and Visualizing the Cid 177

versity of Buenos Aires in 1923, run initially by Américo Castro and later by Amado
Alonso who went on to mentor the prominent Argentinian philo­logist Marí�a Rosa
Lida.17 The academic study of medi­eval Iberia consistently confronted questions of
race and national identity, both Spanish and Argentinian, beginning with exiled Span-
ish historian Claudio Sánchez Albornoz who arrived in Argentina in 1940 and soon
took up a post at the University of Buenos Aires where he founded the journal Cuad-
ernos de historia de España.18 Argentinian academics are interestingly conscious of the
apparent incongruity of the field in a postcolonial context: Marí�a Rodrí�guez Temperley
endeavours to explain “las causas del auge de los Estudios Medi­evales en ‘paí�ses-sin-
Medioevo.’”19 In the case of Argentina, Rodrí�guez Temperley suggests that medi­eval lit-
erature and legends arrived with the colonizers of the Americas: “before being shaped
academically in the cloisters, medi­eval ideals were already part of American founda-
tional narratives and the American imaginary,”20 a view espoused by historian Ricardo
Rojas (1882–1957) who traced the importance of the study of medi­eval Iberia back
to the colonization period. Rojas replaced the negative image of the period crafted
discursively by Sarmiento in the previous century and instead referred to the fertile
influence of medi­eval travel-writing on the Crónicas de Indias.21 Like Albornoz, Rojas
ideo­logically linked the study of medi­eval Iberia to national identity formation in the
present, though in this case it is Argentinian settler-colonial identity that is explicitly
traced back to European literary culture at the expense of heterogeneous and, notably,
indigenous elements.
Both literary and academic discourses on the Iberian Middle Ages in the settler
postcolonial context of Argentina in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries thus nec-
essarily inflect any recourse to neomedi­evalism in its cultural production, as the exam-
ple of Borges’s “La busca de Averroes” has shown. Race and national identity come to
the fore in discussions and appropriations of Iberia’s multicultural past, though the
Argentinian context clearly lacks the cultural baggage of politicized neomedi­evalism
that is still prevalent in Spain, as noted by Alejandro Garcí�a Sanjuán amongst oth-
ers.22 What Spain and Argentina do share is a systemic, politically-motivated refusal
to publicly confront a past of intercultural existence and interaction. Spain is still in

17 Altschul, “On the Shores,” 163.

18 Albornoz’s historio­graphy is characterized by a positivist emphasis on Spanish identity, the
purportedly essential roots of which he traced to the Visigoths in his 1942 work En torno a los
orígenes del feudalismo. His views led to a debate with the US-based scholar Américo Castro, whose
1948 España en su historia conversely argues for the significance of the presence and interaction of
Muslims, Jews, and Christians in medi­eval Iberia in forming a hybrid Spanish culture.
19 Rodrí�guez Temperley, “La edad media,” 221.
20 “antes de forjarse académicamente en los claustros, el ideario medi­eval ya formaba parte de los
relatos fundacionales y del imaginario americano” (Rodrí�guez Temperley, “La edad media,” 223).
21 Rodrí�guez Temperley, “La edad media,” 224.
22 Garcí�a Sanjuán highlights the persistence of the dominant conservative Spanish narrative of
“Muslim invasion” and “Christian reconquest” to describe the Middle Ages, what he calls “una
bomba historiográfica” that has recently been appropriated by the extreme right-wing party Vox
(Garcí�a Sanjuán, “Como desactivar una bomba historiográfica”).
178 Chapter 10

an incredibly slow process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung that often takes ten steps

backwards with commemoration initiatives that either end up exploiting the heritage
of sites such as Toledo for socioeconomic gain through tourism or vindicating one reli-
gious minority while continuing to marginalize another.23 Argentina for its part has
consistently marginalized the indigenista novel in literary criticism preferring to reify
national literary heritage on white settler texts such as Martín Fierro,24 and indeed
has failed to confront the idea that it is a settler-colonial society.25
While attitudes towards Iberian (neo)medi­evalism at a political, literary and aca-
demic level in Argentina are influential on a national scale, this discourse is only a
fraction of what might then go on to influence the production of neomedi­evalisms
in the form of objects of mass or popular culture, to which the ­graphic novel can be
ascribed. No critical work to date has investigated the presence of neomedi­evalisms
in Argentinian mass culture which shares and deviates from the attitudes of “erudite,”
academic medi­evalist discourse in important ways.

Popular Neomedi­evalisms in Argentina

While political, academic, and literary reflections on the Iberian Middle Ages are
important for decoding its perception in contemporary Argentina, to understand the
discourses influential in the formation of mass or popular cultural productions such
as comic books and ­graphic novels, it is arguably more important to question how the
Argentinian population has encountered neomedi­evalisms and, more specifically, PMC
in recent decades. To find out what the European and Iberian Middle Ages mean for
contemporary authors, artists, and audiences of Argentinian ­graphic novels their ped-
agogical formation serves as a useful starting point. Evidence from national and local
curricula shows a homogeneous approach to European medi­eval history in schools, as
well as a move away in recent decades in Argentina’s secondary school system from
the compulsory study of peninsular Spanish literature. David Waiman’s recent doc-
toral thesis on the Middle Ages in history textbooks used in Buenos Aires schools until
2006 unveils how: “As secondary sources they recreate a traditional representation of
the medi­eval world, focusing on great men and famous battles, churches and monas-
teries, and a world characterized by widespread violence.”26
Particularly interesting for the study of Iberian neomedi­evalisms is what Waiman
acknowledges as a widespread tendency to confuse “ethnic questions with matters

23 Such as the recent repatriation initiative extended to the Sephardic Jewish diaspora; an
invitation not extended to largely Muslim descendants of the similarly expelled moriscos.
24 Marí�a Nicolás Alba, “La narrativa indigenista en Argentina.”
25 Gott, “Latin America as a White Settler Society.”
26 “Van recreando a modo de complemento textual representaciones tradicionales del mundo
medi­eval, centrándose en grandes hombres y grandes batallas, iglesias y monasterios y un
mundo marcado por la violencia generalizada” (Waiman, La edad media en los manuales escolares
bonaerenses, 29; my translation).
 Rewriting and Visualizing the Cid 179

of faith” when it comes to medi­eval Islam,27 as well as the reinforcement of “occiden-

talizing narratives” by focusing on Western Europe and thus diminishing the relative
importance and presence of Islam in the Middle Ages.28 As for literary studies, the
1975 national Planes de estudio compiled by the Ministry of Culture and Education
stipulated that the whole of the fourth-year literature course of the bachillerato be
dedicated to peninsular literature, while Argentinian and Latin American literature
was studied in the fifth year.29 However, in the 2015 education reform of Buenos Aires
schools dubbed “La Nueva Escuela Secundaria,” enacted by president Mauricio Macri,
the Ministry of Education makes only one subject compulsory for all students, “Histo-
ria de las ideas en la Argentina, Siglos xix y xx,”30 and for those who choose to study
literature no texts, countries or regions are specified.31 This suggests autonomy is
given to schools to decide the specifics of the curriculum. Anecdotally—and perhaps
inevitably—the lack of a compulsory peninsular Spanish literature module has led
to the decline in the teaching of PMC at a secondary school level, and if this is indeed
the case it makes the perception of the Iberian Middle Ages, the epic and PMC more
fragmented—there is no stable referent, only anecdote, legend, and popular neomedi­
evalisms serve to form a picture of the Cid in the minds of many of those who have
come through the education system in recent years.
When it is taught to school-age students PMC is accessible in dual-text formats pro-
duced in Argentina, such as the recent 2013 Colihue edition containing both a medi­eval
Castilian and modern Spanish version by Leonardo Funes side by side. Collaborators
Pablo Saracino and Manuel Abeledo also include a study guide in an appendix, which
situates PMC generically by giving a detailed overview of the classical, French, German,
and Spanish epic traditions,32 placing the work within a European rather than strictly
Iberian context. The guide includes a series of “propuestas de trabajo” which include
transcribing the poem from a folio, a commentary considering linguistic differences to
modern Spanish and debating the historicity of PMC and exploring issues surrounding
authorship and orality.33 Important for the present study is the encouragement the
editors give students and teachers to engage with modern neomedi­evalisms in light
of a reading of PMC, from critiquing the 1961 film El Cid, to discussing how the Cid is
presented in art and sculpture and comparing the Cid of PMC to the heroes of other
medi­evalist films.34 PMC is thus considered amongst a European panorama of medi­
eval literature and more recent neomedi­evalist cultural production in Argentina, even

27 “cuestiones étnicas con creencias de fe” (Waiman, La edad media en los manuales escolares
bonaerenses, 157).
28 “narrativas occidentalizantes” (Waiman, La edad media en los manuales escolares bonaerenses, 163)
29 Planes de estudio, 19.
30 Diseño curricular, 33.
31 Diseño curricular, 14.
32 Funes, Poema, 140–50.
33 Funes, Poema, 180–83.
34 Funes, Poema, 183–88.
180 Chapter 10

from an education standpoint, which encourages the analysis of how the Middle Ages
are represented today in recreative forms. A desire to engage with modern neomedi­
evalism and a decline in the study of the traditional text opens up an important gap for
the two ­graphic novels to fill.
Beyond school-age study Argentines do continue to encounter and engage with
the European Middle Ages in mass and popular culture. They participate in and con-
sume reincarnations of an unspecific European Middle Ages, evidenced by large com-
munities of neomedi­evalism enthusiasts who congregate both on- and offline to plan
generic ferias medi­evales.35 Generic forms of re-enactment even include tourist sites
such as the curiously-named pseudo-medi­eval village Campanopolis which “conjoins
diverse styles from the European Middle Ages to produce an eclectic individual style,”36
and El Castillo del Cómic in Capilla del Monte, a medi­eval revival-style museum dedi-
cated to comics and popular culture from around the world. By recreating and engag-
ing with both a generically Western European (though not necessarily Iberian) and
fantastical Middle Ages through popular neomedi­evalisms, Argentines thus demon-
strate a tension between the denial of an explicit link to the Iberian—and thus coloniz-
er’s—past, and the vested interest in commemorating and identifying with a generic
European history as a white settler nation.
The generic Middle Ages embodied by neomedi­evalisms as diverse as re-enact-
ments and architecture in Argentina means that the ­graphic novel adaptations CMC
and MC clearly stand out for their decision to invoke medi­eval Iberian literary history.
The two ­graphic novel recreations of PMC could thus be interpreted in a number of
ways:
– As nothing but creative, literary recreations of a far-away fictionalized legend
motivated by both historical curiosity and a desire to connect to a shared—but
generic—European past, akin to other Argentinian manifestations of popular
neomedi­evalism.
– As the inverse of the postcolonial: a modern neocolonial instance of hispanismo, so
denigrated by Borges and his contemporaries and Argentinian nationalists alike.
– As an aspect of transcultural and transnational cultural memory—established
mechanisms in postcolonial theory—that has the ability to be both accepted and
rejected by its target audience.
An analysis of MC and CMC will demonstrate that the first option is untenable, given
the systematic adaptation of the earliest extant version of the legend. The second
and third readings are more plausible given the way in which the ­graphic novels

35 Alonzo cites Game of Thrones and the King Arthur legend as inspirations for Argentinian ferias
medi­evales, rather than any specifically Iberian legends or historic events (Alonzo, “El Auge de las
Ferias Medi­evales”). Thousands are also members of Facebook groups which continually advertise
events recreating neomedi­evalisms as broad as Tolkien and twelfth-century Aquitaine—see, for
example, facebook.com/groups/256792171112086/.
36 “responde a estilos diversos del medioevo europeo unidos para producir un ecléctico estilo
propio” (Campanoplis, campanopolis.com.ar/la-aldea/, “La Aldea: Descripción”).
 Rewriting and Visualizing the Cid 181

engage with or dismiss both their medi­eval precedent and contemporary contexts
as objects of mass culture mediating national and colonial questions of identity
formation.

History of the Form

Finally, before engaging with the texts themselves the question of genre must be
addressed. Why have the four authors and artists in question decided to reconfigure
PMC as a ­graphic novel specifically, and who is the intended and indeed resultant audi-
ence of these works? While the textual narrative of the g­ raphic novels can be more
easily compared with the medi­eval PMC, their images are completely invented yet
draws on a rich tradition of Argentinian, US, and European comic art. As noted above,
CMC and MC are unusual as recreations of Iberian medi­eval literature and though
comics are long-established in Argentina those based on the Iberian Middle Ages
are very unusual. By contrast, medi­evalist comics have been commonplace in Spain
for the best part of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. After the emer-
gence of the comic book proper in the 1930s, Franco’s regime banned US-influenced
superhero comics. The only sanctioned material were historical—in fact fantastical
and medi­evalist—comics such as El Guerrero del Antifaz (1944) by Manuel Gago, and
Capitán Trueno (1956) by Victor Mora and Miguel Ambrosio Zaragoza, though neither
attained popularity in Argentina.37 The Guerrero del Antifaz is half-Muslim—the son
of a Castilian Countess kidnapped by a Muslim king—and dedicates his life to fighting
Muslims to avenge his mother.38 Despite the demise of the dictatorship and its censor-
ship, race and national identity continue to be prevalent themes in modern Spanish
comics, such as the 2009 series Ibéroes: La guerra de las rosas by Iñigo Aguirre and
Javier Tartaglia, which depicts Spanish superheroes avenging an attack by a group
of Chinese immigrants. Jorge González del Pozo shows how it reinforces racist ste-
reotypes and “markedly defines the limits of what is considered Spanish, creating
an impermeability that does not allow for hybridization or the renewal of Spanish

37 Online research into their transmission attests to numerous obituaries marking the recent
deaths of both Gago and Mora in Spanish newspapers, though none appear from Argentina.
38 See Ramón, “Capitán Trueno.” After the end of the dictatorship Spanish comic authors and
artists continued to produce medi­evalist works based on legend, best exemplified by Antonio
Hernández Palacios’ series of medi­evalist comics including Roncesvalles (1981), El Cid: La toma de
Coimbra (1982) and El Cid: La cruzada de Barbastro (1984). Spanish critics have grappled with the
recreation of the medieval in comics in recent years, such as Antonio Huertas Morales’s 2017 edited
collection Edad Media Contemporánea, which features a short chapter on comic books but focuses
on older comics, and Oriol Garcia i Quera’s article that simplifies the mechanisms of neomedievalism
and hypertextual reproduction by reinforcing an impossible tripartite categorization based upon
the extent to which historical comics reflect “historical truth,” making them either educational, for
entertainment, or mixed (“El còmic i la història”). For an overview of Spanish medi­evalist comics
produced in Spain until 2008 see Fernando Galván Freile, “La imagen de la edad media en el comic.”
Galván does not however consider the comics to be in dialogue with contemporary sociopolitical
concerns.
182 Chapter 10

identity.”39 “The limits of what is considered Spanish” continue to be drawn in the

medi­evalist comics in question here, albeit from an Argentinian perspective.40
In Argentina comics have a similarly long history. The first books emerged in the
1930s and the Golden Age is considered to have been from the 1950s to the 1970s,
best represented by the comic El eternauta by Hectór Germán Oesterheld, whose fre-
quent critiques of the military dictatorships saw him imprisoned and presumed mur-
dered. More recently Mauricio Espinoza has shown how since the 1990s artists “have
engaged with the big, contentious issues of contemporary Latin America, including
foreign intervention, loss of national sovereignty, political corruption, poverty, and
insecurity.”41 Historical themes are commonplace in Argentinian works, though comic
neomedi­evalism is rare. One atypical example is by the prominent twentieth-century
cartoonist and humorist Oscar Conti (1914–1979)—pen name Oski—who created
a parody of a medi­eval Italian medical treatise, Comentarios a las tablas médicas de
Salerno (published in 1999). Oski thus recreates the European though not Iberian
Middle Ages, a tendency common in popular Argentinian neomedi­evalisms. Conti and
his contemporaries more frequently found inspiration in national rather than Euro-
pean history: he also published a Vera Historia de Indias (1958), contributed drawings
to the film Primera Fundación de Buenos Aires (1959) and wrote El descubrimiento de
América (1992). Jose Massaroli (1952–) created a series of comic bio­graphies of nine-
teenth-century Argentinian military men published in the conservative newspaper La
Voz (1983), notably including a bio­graphy of Facundo Quiroga whose story Sarmiento
also chose to retell over a century earlier to work through national identity formation
predicated upon a white settler, Europeanized identity.
Comics scholarship is also well-established in Argentina and Latin America more
generally, with critical work having markedly political—even nationalist—founda-
tions with the 1971 work Para leer al Pato Donald by Argentinian–Chilean Ariel Dorf-
man and Belgian Armand Mattelart which took a Marxist view of Disney’s comics as
a form of cultural imperialism. More recent criticism and methodo­logical proposals
have come from Jorge Catalá-Carrasco, Paulo Drinot, and James Scorer’s Comics and
Memory in Latin America (2017) and Edward King and Joanna Page’s Posthumanism
in Latin American Graphic Novels (2019), both of which establish an important prec-
edent by linking the unique formal qualities of the g­ raphic novel to its production of
meaning. Because of their combination of text and image and the particularly visceral
reader experience that comes with the form’s materiality, the collections point firstly

39 “Delimita marcadamente los lí�mites de lo considerado español, creando una impermeabilidad

que no permite la hibridación ni la renovación de la identidad Española” (González del Pozo,
“Ibéroes,” 48).
40 In addition to the precedent for medi­evalist comics in Spain there is an extensive tradition of
medi­evalist historical novels are commonplace (see Raquel Crespo-Vila, “La literatura medi­eval en
la narrativa contemporánea”), and films and television series that depict the Iberian Middle Ages
and its legends continue to be popular (evidenced by the new 2020 Amazon series El Cid).
41 Espinoza, “Neoliberalism in the Gutter,” 1.
 Rewriting and Visualizing the Cid 183

to the form’s ability to relate and trigger memories, as well as to interrogate the bor-
ders between non-human and human, both thematically and structurally.
In addition to considering the ideo­logical significance of reworking the Iberian
Middle Ages in CMC and MC, the following analysis proposes that meaning is also cru-
cially conveyed through what is perhaps their most important formal aspect: the effect
of both text and image on reader experience and the production of meaning. King and
Page consider this under the banner of the “haptic turn” in comics studies, citing Karin
Kukkonen who proposes that the page layout in comics and g­ raphic novels produces
“particular embodied responses in the reader and as a result [intervenes] in the read-
er’s body schema.”42 Graphic novels can also convey meaning using images alone, as
well as employ more traditional literary functions such as narrators and direct speech.
The most startling way in which the g­ raphic narrative adaptations differ from the
medi­eval PMC is in fact the preponderance of direct speech over narrative commen-
tary. The form thus brings us closer to the characters in a way that the epic poem does
not, as we become privy to more conversations, day-to-day activities and throwaway
comments that build on or in some instances contradict the somewhat limited charac-
terization offered by the epic poem or chronicle form.
Lastly, there is a widespread acknowledgment of the efficacy of comics in pedagogy
given their appeal to a younger audience.43 The haptic experience of reading a comic
or ­graphic novel has been scientifically proven to aid memory and comprehension;44
a motive that is particularly pertinent for the two Argentinian reworkings of PMC. CMC
in particular is explicitly targeted at a school-age audience: its publisher LatinBooks
International designates it under their sub-imprint “Novel Gráfica +” together with
other comic literary adaptations as diverse as Anne Frank’s diary, Homer’s Odyssey
and Iliad, and Romeo and Juliet. Akin to the dual-text Colihue edition used in schools
CMC also contains a study guide by way of an appendix, with a glossary of antiquated
terms, an overview of the medi­eval PMC as well as “questions for debate” and “sug-
gested exercises,”45 all of which focus on the figure of the Cid. MC meanwhile is an
overtly cultural project which though aimed at a general adult audience hints at a ped-
agogical subtext given its context of production. Its colophon reveals that it is in fact
a collaborative project between the publisher Loco Rabia and its sponsor CCEBA, the
Centro Cultura de España en Buenos Aires. MC is thus an explicit neo-colonial inter-
vention by the cultural wing of the Spanish state that seeks to support the dissemina-
tion of its medi­eval literary history in a former colony, though mediated by a writer
and two artists from Argentina.
The context of production and intended audience of these works inherently prob-
lematizes the didactic role of comics in history and/or literature, a role that is made

42 King and Page, Posthumanism, 8.

43 Comics as pedagogical tools have recently been advocated in the Spanish context by David
Fernández de Arriba, whose 2019 Memorias y viñetas demonstrates how history teachers can use
comics in the classroom.
44 Cohn, “Your Brain on Comics.”
45 “preguntas para debatir” and “propuestas de trabajar” (Morini, Cantar de mio Cid, 73–77).
184 Chapter 10

even more untenable given the extent to which CMC and MC creatively rework medi­
eval precedent, as they cannot be used uncritically as historical sources and instead
ought to be read as modern Ibero-American neomedi­evalisms from which a presentist
ideo­logy can be adduced given they demonstrate “marked alterities to and continu-
ities with” the Iberian Middle Ages.46
In the analysis that follows I begin by exploring how CMC and MC depart from the
source they claim to be using, focusing on their most dramatic transformation of the
earliest extant medi­eval text: the portrayal of medi­eval gender relations and race rela-
tions.47 An intertextual analysis of the ­graphic novels with their purported hypotext
PMC will reveal how the inevitable and selective abridgement of the epic has been
dealt with by each novel, as well as how telling these silences are. Though as we have
seen the European and Iberian Middle Ages—and indeed PMC itself—are far from
consistently represented or transmitted in twenty-first century Argentina, it is still
worth comparing the comics to the PMC of 1207, as while both divert from it markedly
in places CMC and MC are organized into the same three cantares as PMC. Moreover,
the paratextual material pertaining to both novels—prefaces, afterwords, chapter
headings, and so on—points to a direct authorial engagement with a medi­eval source.
Both are therefore overt rewritings of a hypotext and constitute premeditated forms
of textual transformation.
I then consider to what extent this transformation is inflected by contemporary
sociopolitical concerns as well as other varied representations of the Iberian or Euro-
pean Middle Ages in Argentinian thought, literature, and culture. As products of mass
culture, CMC and MC lack a stable referent or source: as well as PMC of 1207 they amal-
gamate a vision of the Iberian Middle Ages inflected by a limited Argentinian school
curricula, other modern European and Latin American popular neomedi­evalisms, and
the Cid in mass culture more generally—and so an archaeo­logical comparative read-
ing with the medi­eval hypotext in mind is insufficient. It is necessary to interrogate all
possible streams of influence—that is, the mechanisms of creative neomedi­evalism
at play—in order to understand why CMC and MC present a new retelling of PMC and
what ideo­logy this serves in the present. Here I draw on Frederic Jameson’s idea of the
reification of art in mass culture and the utopian impulse of such artistic production.

Adapting the Epic:

Silenced Women and Anachronistic Racial Oppositions
CMC and MC’s most notable transformations of their purported hypotext, PMC, is their
systematic silencing of the significant roles played by Jimena, Elvira, and Sol in the
medi­eval legend. In addition to the significantly reduced role of women they also

46 Haydock, “Medi­evalism and Excluded Middles,” 19.

47 Lauren Beck’s recent mono­graph also explores modern visual neomedi­evalisms that transform
the legendary Cid. Beck similarly analyses the evolving portrayal of gender and race, though largely
in Spanish and European contexts such as France and Germany, where the Cid becomes part of “the
European project to orientalize Spain” (Beck, Illustrating El Cid, 190), and does not examine Cidian
neomedi­evalisms in postcolonial Latin America.
 Rewriting and Visualizing the Cid 185

Figure 10.1: Front cover

of Cantar de mio Cid.
© 2012 Manuel Morini
and Ivan Jacob, LatinBooks
International.

take a polarized view of religious and racial identity by inflecting a sense of crusade
and inherent ideo­logical opposition alien to the medi­eval PMC. From a postcolonial
perspective the staunch focus on the Cid’s masculinity at the expense of his familial
motivations interestingly creates an alternative to the dominant post-independence
perception of Spanish colonialism which “posited a medi­eval Spanish mentality fossil-
ized with the counter-reformation reign of Philip II (1527–1598), manifested mainly
in theocracy and despotism, and which writers believed to have continued until their
own presents.”48 Instead of conveying the Iberian Middle Ages as an era of ineffec-
tual, emotionally driven despots, CMC and MC reframe the Cid as an overtly masculine,

48 Altschul “Medi­evalism in Spanish America,” 153.

186 Chapter 10

Figure 10.2: Jimena in Cantar de mio Cid.

© 2012 Manuel Morini and Ivan Jacob, LatinBooks International.

unemotional crusading hero defined by his military exploits rather than loyalty to his
family.49 Alternatively, both could be read as systematically polarized visions of the
Iberian Middle Ages that are made consciously dissonant with twenty-first century
discourses on gender and race, namely feminist and critical race studies, to ensure
that the Middle Ages does not complicate a narrative of ideo­logical progress when it
comes to identity politics.
CMC takes for granted a conclusively masculine portrayal of the Cid’s life and
milieu. Its blurb explicitly refers to PMC as a “legend and incarnation of the spirit of
knighthood,”50 firmly focusing the axis of the plot on the Cid’s exploits as hero and thus
downplaying the PMC’s equally prominent “sentimental nexus.”51 The front cover also
supports this reading by featuring a stoic Cid holding a veiled Jimena dressed in white,
denying her agency as well as reinforcing notions of women as chattel. A montage

49 The latter is deemed a defining facet of PMC by medi­evalist scholars (Caldin “Women Characters
and the Limits of Patriarchy”).
50 “leyenda y encarnación del espí�ritu caballeresco” (Morini, Cantar).
51 E. Michael Gerli highlights PMC’s “inner universe that exists in consonance with social and
political values” (Gerli, “Liminal Junctures,” 260).
 Rewriting and Visualizing the Cid 187

is superimposed below the couple of the Cid riding into battle with his retinue, one
member holding a flag anachronistically featuring the Jerusalem Cross (figure 10.1).
The silences in the plot attest to the near exclusion of female speech, agency and
sentimentality. The opening excludes the PMC’s famed emotional opening of the Cid
weeping before the gates of Burgos and his interaction with the nine-year-old girl,
whose motivational speech in PMC foreshadows the importance of the feminine as a
driving force behind the Cid’s military exploits. In CMC by contrast we join the Cid in
the thoroughly masculine environment of the encampment outside Burgos where only
Martí�n Antolinez spurs the Cid on with generic battle cries such as “Even to survive
one has to battle.”52 While CMC includes the Cid entrusting his family to Abbot Sancho
at Cardeña, his departure is thoroughly rewritten in a way that diminishes Jimena’s
role. In PMC Jimena is fully conscious of the Cid’s political situation and necessary
exile due to “envious courtiers” and notably uses the epic epithets to refer to her hus-
band akin to his male retinue.53 She moreover takes an active role in the mass to bid
farewell to her husband by delivering an eloquent and extensive prayer before the
audience.54 In stark contrast the Jimena of CMC is oblivious to her husband’s situation,
questioning helplessly “¿volverás?”55 A pious image of Jimena in white depicted in a
near-prayer position is juxtaposed against two darkened panels of her embracing and
then kissing the Cid (figure 10.2). The reader is thus urged to consider her as a pious,
uninvolved and purely physical support to her husband, in contrast to the emotional
and, crucially, religious role she plays in his successes in PMC.
The Cid’s concern for his family is also omitted from CMC: after his first prominent
battle at Alcocer the ­graphic novel excludes the pertinent detail of money being sent
back to Cardeña for their care; his personal motives for success are thus continually
subordinated to the idea of reconquest. The women are left out of the narrative until
the Cid conquers Valencia; they are escorted by Minaya akin to PMC but all details
referring to the careful preparations made and good treatment of the women are left
out—a consistent thematic focus that is crucial to the sentimental ethos of PMC, as
the Cid and his retinue’s treatment of Jimena, Elvira, and Sol are overtly juxtaposed
to that of the Infantes de Carrión. Once the women arrive in Valencia Jimena’s dia-
logue with the Cid is excluded.56 Women are even denied involvement in the events
that directly affect them in the story: the narrative omits the episode in PMC where the
Cid discusses with Jimena the proposed marriage of their daughters to the Infantes
de Carrión, skipping directly to the wedding ceremony. Jimena is later also denied an
opportunity to speak before the daughters leave for Carrión.57 Elvira and Sol too are
seemingly unable to voice their feelings, as their retorts to the Infantes at Corpes are

52 “Aún para sobrevivir hay que luchar” (Morini, CMC, 7).

53 “malos mestureros” (Smith, PMC, 10; lines 266–67).
54 Smith, PMC, 12; lines 330–65.
55 Morini, CMC, 11.
56 Morini, CMC, 39.
57 Morini, CMC, 56.
188 Chapter 10

excluded, as is Sol’s poignant discussion with Félez Muñoz who finds them after their
abuse in PMC.58 CMC thus almost entirely silences female voices, thoroughly denies
women any semblance of agency and expunges their decisive influence over the Cid in
PMC. In addition to consistently reducing the role of women, CMC also anachronisti-
cally suppresses aspects of male characters that to a modern audience connote femi-
ninity, such as the attention to the aesthetic and appearance demonstrated by the Cid’s
retinue as they enter Toledo for the Cortes in the third cantar.59 Though CMC overtly
uses PMC by structuring its narrative into three cantares, that is largely where the
similarities end. Thematically and in terms of ethos CMC entirely removes PMC’s sen-
timental nexus and as a result the plot arguably lacks coherence, with women silenced
and relegated to their mere physical presence, rather than an emotional connection,
the emotional climax of CMC and the girls’ abuse is lessened versus the source text.
MC meanwhile differs from CMC in the fact that its audience is not explicitly young
adult, though its patronage is undeniably Spanish and could thus be read as a neo-
colonial intervention. As a piece of “literary diplomacy” its portrayal of women and
religious minorities is therefore less likely to reflect the sociopolitical climate of con-
temporary Argentina, given it is an overt presentation of the Iberian Middle Ages by the
Spanish state. The Spanish influence is clear from the start with the writer Alejandro
Farias crediting the anonymous author of PMC and listing himself only as the adapter
“to the language of comics.”60 The art of MC is also black and white versus the bombas-
tic, cartoonish colours of CMC, granting a more sombre and pseudo-historical tone to
the work. Despite its political, diplomatic guise MC still falls foul to the same selective
silencing of femininity as CMC. The nine-year-old girl is once again absent from the
opening scene at Burgos and MC more explicitly removes the Cid’s familial motivation
by excluding the episode of him entrusting his family to the abbot at Cardeña, and the
women’s farewell, including Jimena’s prayer. MC interestingly reframes the Cid’s moti-
vation as a religious one, for the Raquel and Vidas episode is followed immediately by
the Cid’s dream vision of the Angel Gabriel.61 A full-page image of a vicious, pupil-less
Gabriel superimposed upon a perspiring Cid jolts both the reader and the campeador
into action, motivated by the idea of religious quest as in CMC (figure 10.3).
The Cid’s characterization as a fearsome warrior is stressed over his role as father
and husband. Visually the Cid is terrifying: the front cover depicts his battle stance,
with dark, emotionless eyes beneath his helmet, an image repeated throughout the
text (figure 10.4).
The excision of important scenes involving women that ultimately constitute the
Cid’s motivation all but destroys the PMC’s sentimental nexus. The decision to divert
from PMC in this way is highly calculated, given MC follows minute details of PMC in
other areas—for example, we are given the throwaway yet highly specific instruction

58 Smith, PMC, 86; lines 2786–98.

59 Smith, PMC, 94; line 3085 onwards.
60 “al lenguaje de la historieta” (Farias, MC, 5).
61 Farias, MC, 13.
 Rewriting and Visualizing the Cid 189

Figure 10.3: The Cid’s

dream in Mio Cid.
© 2018 Alejandro
Farias, Antonio
Acevedo, and Nicolás
Ávila, Loco Rabia.

by the Cid to Minaya, “you will go with two hundred men.”62 Like CMC, MC also omits
the scene of Minaya bringing the Cid’s family to Valencia which underscores the
importance of treating women well in PMC; a scene that is in purposeful ideo­logical
opposition to the behaviour of the Infantes de Carrión. The omission of this idea in
CMC and MC thus means the Infantes’ behaviour is implicitly not as thoroughly deni-
grated as in PMC. The Cid’s family appear for the first time much later in the story at
Valencia, where Jimena is again denied any real direct speech, her emotions reduced
to three words: “I’m afraid, Rodrigo.”63 Her minimized characterization is reinforced
a few pages later when the Cid announces he is leaving to meet Alfonso: the cen-

62 “irás con doscientos hombres” (Farias, MC, 16; Smith, PMC, 16; line 441).
63 “tengo miedo, Rodrigo” (Farias, MC, 32).
190 Chapter 10

tral panel of the page depicts

Jimena staring open-mouthed
at the Cid questioning blithely
“And us?” regarding the fate of
her family;64 a cluelessness that
could not be further from the
stoic and politically-conscious
Jimena of PMC. The Cid also
overtly withholds the informa-
tion regarding the marriage
proposal from her until he
returns from Castile. Jimena’s
role is then once again dimin-
ished once the marriage is
announced as her discussion
with the Cid regarding the
union is omitted. 65 The same
fate befalls Elvira and Sol as
in CMC: neither is granted any
direct speech at the Corpes epi-
sode in MC. 66 Like CMC, then,
MC avoids the domestic senti-
mentality that proves a crucial
motivator for the Cid of PMC. Figure 10.4: Front cover of Mio Cid. © 2018 Alejandro Farias,
It replaces the Cid’s familial Antonio Acevedo, and Nicolás Ávila, Loco Rabia.
interactions with a stringent
focus on battle and warfare throughout, preferring gruesome visualizations of conflict
over narrative interventions, rewriting the medi­eval text (and thus medi­eval Iberian
history for the Argentinian audience) as a masculinist tale of one man’s insuperable
physical prowess.
Alongside the rewriting of PMC’s female characters, both ­graphic novels signifi-
cantly rewrite the characterization and role of the legends’ Semitic characters. An
analysis of the Cid’s Muslim and Jewish enemies and allies in CMC and MC demon-
strates that the authors and artists project a polarized and thus politicized depiction
of religious minorities that is alien to the medi­eval hypotext of PMC. The systematic
relegation of women to passive roles in CMC is directly connected to its portrayal of
Semitic characters and the Cid’s interaction with them: without the familial motivation
for the Cid to reverse his exile as in PMC, his exploits are justified by Morini and Jacob

64 “¿Y nosotras?” (Farias, MC, 40).

65 Farias, MC, 43.
66 Farias, MC, 60–61.
 Rewriting and Visualizing the Cid 191

Figure 10.5: Warfare in Cantar de mio Cid.

© 2012 Manuel Morini and Ivan Jacob, LatinBooks International.
192 Chapter 10

to be religiously motivated crusades as the “fight against the Moor,”67 an ideo­logical

justification absent from PMC. A subjective narrator reinforces a crusading ethos from
the start, further underscored by the Cid’s retinue wearing evocative red and white
outfits into battle, echoing the Jerusalem Cross featured on the novel’s front cover. The
role of Raquel and Vidas, the Jewish moneylenders, is also heavily condensed in CMC.
The two are dangerously visually caricatured reinforcing modern antisemitic stereo-
types and are portrayed as more avaricious than in PMC. CMC then goes on to omit any
hint of a friendly or reciprocal relationship across religio-cultural boundaries, such as
the way in which Martí�n Antolinez refers to them respectfully as “my dear friends,”68
and Raquel’s request for a fur tunic from the Cid that the latter promises to fulfil.
The Cid is not only visually depicted as a crusader but frames himself as one in
direct speech: “I will declare Castejón a conquered city.”69 The g­ raphic novel moreover
consistently removes any instances of clemency that the Cid grants to those he faces
in battle, such as the freeing of the people of Castejón and granting them monetary
rewards in PMC.70 The battle is instead depicted as incredibly bloody in CMC,71 though
the Cid of PMC avoids gratuitous violence. An invented exchange is included in CMC
between the Cid and Minaya with the former requesting his men to refer to him as
“Sidi,” gesturing to his epithet’s Arabic origin. The exchange seems to be included only
for Minaya to rebuke the Cid’s cross-border allegiances by retorting “Cid is better. It
sounds more Christian,”72 reinforcing religious polarization.
The characterization of Muslims also attests to the idea of a “religious war”—the
citizens of Alcocer call the Cid and his retinue “infidels,” while the narrator then seem-
ingly retaliates by anachronistically dehumanizing them in their death, killed by the
Cid’s men “as in a mousetrap”.73
At Alcocer too the Cid frees captives in PMC,74 a detail unsurprisingly expunged
from the crusading narrative of CMC. The narrator plays a decisive role in the read-
er’s experience of CMC: unlike the first-person juglaresque narration of an epic poem
which includes the juglar’s first person voice akin to another character in the legend,
a ­graphic novel’s narrator is visually imbued with authority by having its judgments
in the privileged position of a highlighted box rather than the traditional comic speech
bubbles granted to characters. The reader is thus visually and physically alerted to
their presence and judgment in a way that grants the narrator an undue power to
judge and conclude upon the events of the text. The narrator consistently reinforces
religious polarization and conflict, claiming at Alcocer: “For three years, Alcocer was

67 “lucha contra el moro” (Morini, CMC, 12).

68 “los mios amigos caros” (Smith, PMC, 104).
69 “declaré a Castejón, ciudad conquistada” (Morini, CMC, 13).
70 Smith, PMC, 19; line 540.
71 Morini, CMC, 15.
72 “Cid es mejor. Suena más cristiano” (Morini, CMC, 22).
73 “infieles,” “como en una ratonera” (Morini, CMC, 18–19).
74 Smith, PMC, 21; lines 616–22.
 Rewriting and Visualizing the Cid 193

known as the City of the Cid. Its new name spread like wildfire among the villages of
Al-Andalus.”75 There is also a marked absence of narratorial sympathy for the citizens
of Valencia when they placed under starvation by the Cid’s retinue.76
Akin to its portrayal (or lack thereof ) of women, it is the silences that are most
telling when it comes to CMC’s portrayal of Semitic characters and religio-cultural
interaction. CMC notably excludes the entire episode of the Cid’s battle against the
Count of Barcelona found in PMC, thus suppressing inter-Christian conflict—and
indeed the detail that the Count of Barcelona as a Christian fought with Muslims in
his retinue—in favour of a consistent presentation of the Cid as a crusading warrior.
The only instance in which religio-cultural cooperation is hinted at is at the taking of
Valencia where the Cid invites both Christians and Muslims to join his retinue. Yet the
CMC narrator quickly exploits this as an opportunity to overtly denigrate the Muslim
soldiers, calling them “reneguedes” who “are drawn by gold and fame.”77 Also absent
is the battle against the King of Morocco at Játiva, likely because the king escapes in
PMC—a detail that would destabilize the Cid’s image as invincible crusader. The most
notable absence, however, is the character of Abengalbón who is entirely excised from
the story, presumably because his vassalic relationship with the Cid would negate the
narrative’s consistent opposition of Christian and Muslim. CMC thus transforms the
Cid’s character and chips away at his mesura, making him treat Semitic characters
more overtly harshly than in PMC. The anachronistic crusading ethos imbued in the
story and the exaggeration of hostilities between religio-cultural groups is alien to the
medi­eval text and context.
MC also exhibits a crusading ethos, though as previously noted its sombre tone
frames it as a pseudo-historical narrative. To that end the text is permeated in the
first half by frequent full-page maps that delineate “Spanish territory” and “Moor-
ish territory,”78 which centres the plot on the Cid’s “reconquest” of Andalusi territory,
rather than returning to and providing for his family or regaining the king’s favour.79
While the narrator does not overtly denigrate the Cid’s Muslim enemy as in CMC,
it is still notable that the Cid’s quest since leaving Burgos is defined by “enemies,”
whereas in PMC the motivation to conquer towns and cities is largely economic and
connected to his desire to return to his family. Battles are also referred to using subtly
politicized language, with Minaya announcing to the Cid “the Moors invaded cultivated
land” before the battle against King Yusuf.80

75 “Durante tres años, Alcocer fue la ciudad del Cid. Ese nombre comenzaba a serpentear como
pólvora encendida entre los pueblos del Al-Á� ndalus” (Morini, CMC, 25).
76 See Smith, PMC, 38; lines 1178–80.
77 “renegados,” “acuden al oro y la fama” (Morini, CMC, 30).
78 “territorio español,” “teritorio moro” (Farias, MC, 15).
79 “territorio español,” “territorio moro” (Farias, MC, 15, 21, 24 and 28).
80 “los moros invadieron las huertas” (Farias, MC, 33).
194 Chapter 10

Figure 10.6: Map in Mio Cid. © 2018 Alejandro Farias,

Antonio Acevedo, and Nicolás Ávila, Loco Rabia.
 Rewriting and Visualizing the Cid 195

The Cid’s mesura and respect for Muslims is, however, maintained in MC as he is
shown sharing booty with the inhabitants of Castejón,81 and he moreover goes into
battle with the Count of Barcelona unlike in CMC, underscoring the presence of inter-
nal conflict within the Spanish kingdoms. While Abengalbón is present in MC his
role is greatly reduced, as he is not involved in the women’s journey to Valencia as
in PMC. Raquel and Vidas are not visually caricatured and difference is not overtly
underscored: they are depicted as tall and strong, concordant with PMC, though like
CMC Raquel’s interaction with the Cid requesting a favour is left out, subtly reducing
their cooperation and the Cid’s respect for his Jewish allies. Visually MC’s depiction
of Andalusi soldiers is not as exaggerated as CMC: while their armour is understand-
ably distinctive their facial features are not caricatured or superficially darkened as
in CMC.82 However, MC’s thematic focus on battle scenes reduces the Andalusi armies
to deindividualized masses in scenes of conflict throughout. Overall MC’s historical
posturing makes it much closer to PMC than CMC, though this equally means that any
diversion from the earliest manu­script that claims to have been used by the ­graphic
novels’ creators is even more of a significant decision. A pattern is established in MC
of a subtle and systematic erasure of the favourable depictions of Semitic peoples and
their alliances with the Cid found in PMC. This is not as all-encompassing as in CMC,
though rewrites the Cid as a warrior above all else.

Contemporary Identity Politics or a Utopian Vision?

The textual transformations discussed above clearly point to an at least partially
shared ideo­logical objective in the transformation of the medi­eval PMC, which is all
the more curious given the different publishers and intended audiences for CMC and
MC. While the former could have consulted the latter prior to publication, MC’s close
affiliation to PMC makes this unlikely. Both adaptations thus independently mediate
similar ideo­logical concerns that resonate with twenty-first century Argentina. This
stance contradicts the recent work on politicized (neo)medi­evalism by Andrew Elliott,
who suggests that much literary or creative (neo)medi­evalism is somewhat depoliti-
cized, “fictional depictions tend to wear their medi­evalisms openly on their sleeves” in
comparison to the usage of the Middle Ages in political discourse; “those cases where
the medi­eval finds itself exploited, like Joan of Arc, for political ends, to make a rhe-
torical point or to support an unquestionably modern ideo­logical position.”83 Yet the
­graphic novels come somewhere in between the distinction that Elliott is making. CMC
and MC’s didactic imperative and postcolonial context mean that like all creative forms
of (neo)medi­evalism the medi­eval is ideo­logically repurposed to serve a contempo-
rary ideo­logy. We thus cannot absolve creative or literary reworkings of the medi­eval
from politicization solely because their authors or audiences are not directly involved
in politics as per the examples Elliott explores. Their engagement with present-day

81 Farias, MC, 20.

82 Farias, MC, 23.
83 Elliott, Medi­evalism, 5.
196 Chapter 10

concerns is moreover inevitable given the varied way in which European neomedi­
evalisms are encountered and transmitted in Argentina today. MC and CMC thus do
not solely utilize the PMC as a source for their vision of the Iberian Middle Ages: as
we have seen both PMC and medi­eval Europe have reached Argentines through varied
sources from school curricula, educational editions to modern medi­evalist films.
There are two possible readings of the politicization of identity categories in CMC
and MC, and an explanation of both will unveil the most plausible. Firstly, they may
be read as a reflection of an eternalized vision of gender and racial opposition predi-
cated upon the marginalization of women and minorities, akin to the way in which
the “Reconquista” has been appropriated by the far right in contemporary Spain. The
authors and artists could thus be projecting an anachronistic view of PMC that tac-
itly legitimates gender inequality and racism in present-day Argentina. The present
sociopolitical climate arguably makes this more likely: the emphasis of racial differ-
ence and de-emphasis of cooperation between Christians, Muslims and Jews found in
CMC and MC could speak to growing Islamophobia and anti-Semitism since the turn
of the century in Argentina, the country with the largest Muslim and Jewish popula-
tions in Latin America.84 The silencing of PMC’s women through the excision of impor-
tant scenes and a reduction in their speech comes during the fourth wave of feminist
activism in the country, best exemplified by the #NiUnaMenos movement founded in
2015 in response to growing levels of femicide. Activists have continued to convene
annually on June 3, and claims have expanded to include rights for the LGBT com-
munity, women’s reproductive rights, and equal pay.85 Ignacio Aguiló’s recent study
on the racialization of economic anxiety is particularly pertinent for the portrayal of
racial and religious difference in these contemporary g­ raphic narratives. Aguiló has
assessed the racialized politics of neoliberal policy in the face of the 2001 economic
crisis in Argentina which was read through race by sectors of Argentinian society:
“The crisis induced a preoccupation with questions of nationness and national belong-
ing in Argentinians, which was partly crystallized through discourses of whiteness.
Widespread fears of impoverishment and tangible experiences of social descent dur-
ing this period were frequently framed as a process of blackening, ‘Africanisation’ and
‘Latin Americanisation.’”86
Aguiló’s analysis makes this reading more plausible: given the homogenization of
race in the Iberian neomedi­evalisms of CMC and MC express similar anxieties to what

84 Isaac Caro has proposed that rising Islamophobia in Latin America’s southern cone is directly
influenced by recent Islamophobic narratives in the European and American media (Caro,
“Islamophobia in the First Decades,” 14). A prominent Islamophobic incident in 2018 saw two
Muslim brothers detained and abused in custody as a result of false accusations by a neighbour
(https://www.laizquierdadiario.com/Causa-armada-de-como-Bullrich-y-la-DAIA-les-arruinaron-
la-vida-a-los-hermanos-Salomon). Reports also attest to a marked increase of 107 percent in
antisemitic incidents from 2017 to 2018 (https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Argentina-sees-107-
percent-spike-in-antisemitism-603445). In 2018 an incident at a football match in Buenos Aires
saw fans chanting an antisemitic slogan.
85 Moseley, Protest State, 110.
86 Aguiló, The Darkening Nation, 3.
 Rewriting and Visualizing the Cid 197

Aguiló notes in twenty-first century cultural production and political commentary. Yet
if this were indeed the case—that the authors and artists ideo­logically alter an extant
text to imbue it with implicit support for the worsening conditions of women and
minorities in Argentina in their work—they surely would have done so to a story that
speaks more directly to Argentina’s present, rather than the remote cultural history
of its erstwhile colonizer. By rewriting the Cid as a violent warrior with less regard
for his family and alliances across racial and religious differences, CMC and MC reflect
more on what the Iberian—and even more generally the European- Middle Ages mean
for Argentines today, and how they should look back to them.
I thus argue that CMC and MC rewrite the past to exaggerate its antitheses with the
present. In the very same vein as Sarmiento in the 1800s, they appropriate the Middle
Ages to create an ideo­logical foil for the twenty-first century. They seek to implicitly
legitimate the myth at the heart of neoliberal policy: the idea of modern ideo­logical
progress as a result of capitalist structures versus an inherently backward and mor-
ally corrupt past. A discursive reaffirmation of progress, of “mira lo lejos que hemos
llegado,”87 comes at a time when Argentina is experiencing rising levels of poverty and
social immobility as a result of the financial crisis in the early 2000s.88 Moreover, as
mass-produced g­ raphic novels drawing on a multitude of sources in their production
and audience they can be deemed elements of mass or popular culture. Fredric Jame-
son’s formulation of the reification of art in mass culture can be applied in this case,
given both novels are clear examples of a repetition of cultural production with no sta-
ble source text; as we have seen, PMC alongside numerous variegated and unknowable
neomedi­evalisms are brought to bear upon the g­ raphic adaptations.89 Both g­ raphic
novels efface the old forms of derogatory anti-hispanismo postulated by thinkers of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Sarmiento to Borges, characterized by a
vision of the Iberian Middle Ages as backwards and/or irrelevant to Argentina’s his-
tory, and in place of this ideo­logical position CMC and MC develop an uncomplicated,
utopian vision of the European past to which the present—despite growing levels of
misogyny and racism—compares relatively favourably.
CMC and MC ultimately process social anxieties surrounding masculinity and race
and present a utopian solution by presenting misogyny and racial opposition as his-
torically foregrounded for a settler-colonial audience. Despite their mass appeal, they
contain ideo­logical content and project “the optical illusion of social harmony” by
uncomplicating the story of the Cid.90 In many ways this is a romantic (though exclu-
sive) view of the medi­eval past: the ­graphic novels become a means to an end to com-
municate an easily resolvable conclusion on the Iberian Middle Ages—given in many
respects the Cid functions as a metonymy for the entire period as the canonical text

87 “Look how far we’ve come” (my translation).

88 See Matí�as Cristobo who explores how neoliberal economic policies led to social immobility
and rising poverty until 2009 (Cristobo, “El neoliberalismo en Argentina”).
89 Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” 138.
90 Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” 141.
198 Chapter 10

and symbol of the purported “Reconquista.” There is thus an element of social hope
and idealization contained within these ­graphic novels. If the Cid’s story had remained
entirely faithful to PMC, including the significant role of women and the Cid’s amicable
relationships across religious and racial difference, it would perhaps be more uncom-
fortable today to look back and see how complicated and unessential categories of
identity were in a period that are often decried as the “dark ages” or “los años oscuros”
in both Anglophone and Spanish-speaking contexts. By presenting the story of the Cid
as one that denies women’s agency and exalts Christianity, the Argentinian audience
of MC and CMC can comfortably look back from an imperfect neoliberal present which
becomes vindicated as undeniable evidence of progress.

Conclusions
An intertextual and visual analysis of Cantar de mio Cid and Mio Cid, which use both a
pre-existing medi­eval hypotext and innumerable other neomedi­evalist transforma-
tions, has demonstrated that it is the silences, amendments and textual transforma-
tions that belie their reflection of contemporary sociopolitical concerns. The complex
postcolonial context of CMC and MC means that their calculated silencing of women
and their promotion of a crusading “reconquest” ethos reflects a new rewriting of
the Iberian Middle Ages for the Argentinian audience that diametrically opposes the
identity politics of PMC to twenty-first century standards that are being both eroded
and demanded in Argentina. This is potentially a Utopian vision: a purposefully dis-
paraging recreation of the medi­eval that makes the period and its actors seem worse
in order to generate a “social hope” of progress for the Argentina of the present day,
struggling with economic inequality and the growing polarization of gender and racial
identities.
 Rewriting and Visualizing the Cid 199

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