providentially intervenes: “Stop, comrades [...]. This is not how a battle is won [...]. Listen to me first [...]. This way we will never achieve our ideals. I am the Médico Asesino, your comrade from Mexico City.” He persuades the masses to accept him as their leader: “His blue eyes and calmness, his ability to clearly express his ideas to the crowd—demanding work, equality, bread, schools, land for farmers [...]—made the crowds idolize him.” However, the freedom-fighting Médico does not speak in the name of communism, but rather finds his inspiration in the undefeatable ideology of the Mexican Revolution: “Mexico [...] has been a bulwark for defending the ideas that your people fight for. We were guided by the greatest and fairest of statesman. And new comrades [...] continue to spread our ideals and make our dreams of equality come true [...]. This is the message that I bring in their name to fight alongside your people.” Then “[...] flags started waving [...], the song of The Internationale resounded in the streets and the joy of the people burst out in the presence of the giant masked man who was their leader [...].” Armageddon “A flash of light filled the stadium, flaring [...] as if a huge bomb […] had exploded, [... ] its pale sheen covered everything [...] Jim smiled at the Japanese soldier, and felt like telling him that the light was a premonition of his death [...]”—J.G. Ballard. The explosion of “a second sun” lies at the heart of Empire of the Sun, the central
chapter of the autobiography of the same name that, in turn, is the key to the bewildering body of work of a Shanghai-born Englishman who stranded in Japaneseoccupied China at the age of fifteen, witnessed a bizarre flash of lightning over Hiroshima. This fundamental experience runs through Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Terminal Beach, The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash— apocalyptic works that are afterthoughts of the artist’s “premonition of death” as a young man. Ballard’s entire generation, that of the mid-twentieth century, was scarred by The Bomb. And José G. Cruz, who was twenty-eight years old when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed, belonged to that generation. That is why the author of Santo, El Enmascarado de Plata is an apocalyptic cartoonist; that is why there are so many images of The Bomb in his great big drawer of alphabetically-ordered material; that is why the publication is called Una revista atómica; that is why there is an ominous “nuclear mushroom” on the cover of issue 356 published in April 1955; that is why in issue 505, in March 1956, the threat is radioactivity; that is why the end of the world is an obsessively recurrent issue in a otherwise naïve and childish saga. But Cruz envisions our “last days” as biblical rather than as a technological anti-utopia. Not only because the cartoonist’s and his readers’ cultural background is Catholicism but also because, just as in the Middle Ages when genocide, starvation and plagues ran rampant, in the mid-twentieth
century the end of the world seemed imminent. And what better way to express the “premonition of death” inspired by The Bomb than Saint John’s Apocalypse. “And lo, there was a great earthquake, and the sun turned black [...] and the moon turned to blood [...]” (6:12). “And the stars in the sky fell unto earth [...]” (6:13). “And the sky receded [...] and every mountain and island was removed from its place [...]” (6:15), writes the prophet on Pathmos. “The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed [...] ruin will rain down upon them,” said President Truman on August 6, 1945. “At the instant of its incomparable blast, air became flame, walls turned to dust [...]” reported Life on August 20. “A flash of white lightning covered the sky [...] all around I saw death, [...] smoke [...] and everything burned within a huge bubble,” a Japanese soldier told the same magazine. Perhaps because of their utter bewilderment, witnesses and reporters used almost Biblical wording: “There was a terrific flash of light in plain day, [...] then smoke rising into a 20 000 foot-high mushroom of ash [...]” wrote Life; “An impenetrable cloud of dust covered the city” reported the New York Times on August 7. “And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by the smoke of the pit. [...]”states John in 9:2. In 1945 two atomic bombs wiped the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki off the map and vaporized 100 000 people; in
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