Gordo’s Cat by Gus Arriola encapsulates the beauty and simplicity of everyday life through strong, bold, clear lines. The cat is the star of the comic, circling around his life as a feline friend to Gordo. Interestingly, it seems as though Arriola doesn’t write the storyline himself. Under every title there is a subheading saying another person’s name suggesting that a different story is written by many different people every time. Then again, the names are oddly anagrams for other things such as “E.Z. Mark” and “I. Hedda Dreem” yet Arriola signs all of his comics at the end. On the topic of names, it is comical that Arriola uses “Gordo” as the name for the cat’s owner. If you are Latinx/Hispanic you should know that this can either be a term of endearment (e.g. gordita/o) or it is a comical insult. There is even a popular television show named “Gordo y Flaca” where the man is fat and the woman is thin. That name for a talk show (ish) program would never have been let on air in the United States, but in Latin America, fat isn’t always as bad an insult as it could be elsewhere especially with regards to men. Just as interesting, Gordo’s cat doesn’t seem to have a name beside “Gato” which literally translates from Spanish to cat, unless I am mistaken. The animals sometimes call the cat “Poos” which I presume is just a phonetic way of saying “puss” as in pussycat. The naming of people is a concept that seems to be fluid and comical in Arriola’s popular comic. Perhaps he simply doesn’t want to think of names, or he wants to make them as comical as possible. It is an interesting contrast between the subject matter that sometimes arises especially in the critter pdf that seems highly philosophical sometimes.
This is an interesting observation–when reading Gordo, I didn’t notice the subheadings. I wonder if he did write the comics in collaboration with other people, or if he was possibly doing somethings similar to Tezuka, who in The Mysterious Underground Men wrote out his cast of characters at the beginning like they are movie stars. I also think the use of names in Gordo is interesting. Because the drawings are so simple, I think the characters’ names might be so simple because the writer wants to make them as relatable as possible.
It’s quite unfortunate that these characters do not have actual names. The “names” that do appear such as: Gordo, Poos, and Bee point out obvious physical features. They are not as creative but do serve a comical purpose. Personally, I would have preferred these characters be given real names since they are recurring characters. Although I may not agree with Arriola’s approach, I do understand his decision. By not giving his characters real names, he allows his characters to be “universal” in the eyes of his readers. Additionally, he achieves this sense of universality, through simple drawings. If the yellow cat, for example, was illustrated as a white, fluffy cat with blue eyes, it would definitely change the way we perceive the story. Instead of picturing a chill, lap cat, we would imagine a snobby white cat like the ones in commercials… or at least I would.