Don Juanito el super masho en: ¿Dónde coño están las tías? (Don Juanito the Super Macho in: Where the Hell Are the Girls?)

Nazario Luque Vera, known artistically as Nazario, is one of the great pioneers of underground comics in Spain and a key figure in counterculture and gay visibility during the Spanish transition to democracy in Barcelona. He contributed to magazines such as El Rrollo enmascarado, Star and El Víbora, where he published his most emblematic series, Anarcoma, starring a transvestite detective who became an absolute icon of sexual dissidence in Spanish comics. Nazario shared the stage and his life with underground icons such as Ocaña and Camilo, with whom he starred in street actions, performance art pieces and films. This trio symbolised a vibrant, queer, defiant and deeply artistic Barcelona, where the street became a political, poetic space. His work not only broke taboos, but it also gave aesthetic and cultural visibility to homosexuality in a context where it was still criminalised by the 1970 Ley de Peligrosidad Social (Social Danger Law). Through his comics, Nazario freely expressed the pleasures, frustrations and desires of a marginalised community, using direct, Baroque and graphic language laden with references to his native Andalusia, the grotesque and nightlife.

In 1978, his design for the cover of fanzine Rock Comix issue 4 was plagiarised for the cover of Lou Reed’s album Take No Prisoners, sparking a legal dispute that was not resolved until 2000 in Nazario’s favour.

Raúl Martínez Arranz