‘Loco’ Motive

‘Crying Macho Man’ Cartoonist Jose Cabrera Signs at Village Books and Comic-Con International

On July 31, Jose Cabrera will sign copies of his “You So Loco” collection, now on sale at Village Books.
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On July 31, Jose Cabrera will sign copies of his “You So Loco” collection, now on sale at Village Books.
Photo by Rich Schmitt, Staff Photographer

It’s a “Man, Man, Man, Man’s World,” sang James Brown. But Jose Cabrera’s weekly Web comic is a mad, mad, mad, mad world wherein the Godfather of Soul might get beat down by the Beatles.
Non sequiturs run rampant in the strange-bedfellows universe of “Crying Macho Man.”
With its satirical pastiche of celebrities, politicians, and original characters, “Crying Macho Man” resembles an edgy hybrid of MAD magazine, “Saturday Night Live” and “SCTV.” In one strip, Prince phones Fidel Castro to get his guitar back. In other strips, a grizzly bear argues with his physician, and Count Dracula meets his match in the exasperatingly perky Mindy the Telemarketer. CMM is the type of strip in which, post-Katrina, President Bush tries to get a refund on the Louisiana Purchase from French prime minister Jacques Chirac because it’s got a leak in it.
“Humor comics are back,” says the upbeat Cabrera, 38, whose CMM is a departure in a sea of superhero comics. “I’m trying to break the mold of an industry that needs a funny lift!”
The Playa del Rey resident signs his second CMM collection, “You So Loco,” on Thursday, July 31 at Village Books on Swarthmore.
[Full disclosure: this reporter, also a cartoonist, wrote the foreword for “You So Loco.”]
This may not be your Village People’s “Macho Man,” yet “Crying Macho Man” is just as multicultural.
No one is spared from the Dominican-American cartoonist’s exacting pen: Anglo-Saxons, African-Americans, Asians, Jews, everyone gets it––especially Cabrera’s fellow Latin contingent. The independent cartoonist’s creations include Fry Cook Chef, Gay Cheapskate, and Cleveland, a paraplegic detective sending up generations of aggressively quirky investigators from “Columbo” to “Monk” and “House.”
Politically incorrect, yes––and yet CMM is not exactly mean-spirited…sort of like the way Don Rickles heckles an audience member, then leaves him with a smile and a “God bless ya!” With CMM, it’s all in good fun, poking at our foibles and stereotypes, exclaiming: “We’re all in this soup together, folks!”
“He’s just a nice optimistic person,” says cartoonist Keith Knight of Cabrera, “which to me is such the opposite of other cartoonists. Plus, the references he makes are so spot on, whether it’s Prince or Martin Luther King or ‘Sanford and Son.’”
As the societal observer behind the long-running alternative weekly staple “The K Chronicles” and the new syndicated strip “The Knight Life,” Knight knows first-hand what a balancing act producing a politically charged strip can be. Cabrera achieves it, he says.
“You can wind up preaching and whining, and those are two places where you don’t really want to go,” Knight says. “You don’t want to be just depressing and that’s easy, especially [with recent politics].”
CMM flirts with topical humor, but not in a way that would quickly render a “Doonesbury” dated. Cabrera is less interested in the minutiae of current events and more interested in holding a mirror to the hypocrisies of the powerful and the shallowness of our culture. By underscoring such buffoonery, he cuts across party lines.
Only in CMM will you find Bush phoning his homeboy Chuck D. of Public Enemy, or running gags about Charlie Rose, a talk-show personality on PBS, losing his marbles mid-interview. Cabrera thrives on such contradictions.
Cabrera’s penchant for strange bedfellows goes back to the Dominican/Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of his youth in New York’s Washington Heights, where he grew up with his six siblings. As a 1970’s child, he inherited a cousin’s Marvel Comics collection, while soaking up “Popeye” cartoons and “Astro Boy” dubbed in Spanish. MAD proved influential, as did one film: “Superman.” Eight-year-old Cabrera identified with the 1978 blockbuster. “I don’t want to be in Washington Heights and poor! I want to fly out of here!” he recalls thinking at the time.
Drawing helped Cabrera get through childhood. The first chance he had, Cabrera made like Snake Plissken and escaped from New York by enrolling in the Maryland Institute College of Art. He later earned six figures as a graphic designer and art director at big advertising firms, including Grey and Saatchi & Saatchi.
In 1999, Cabrera relocated to L.A. to work for Inc-Cubate. By the time the online firm succumbed to the dot.com bust of 2000, Cabrera had abandoned advertising and its fat paychecks. Disillusioned, he left what he deemed a soul-crushing atmosphere, despising “the competitiveness, the pettiness, the way the bosses pitted people against each other,” and enrolled at Loyola Marymount University, where Cabrera met his wife, Naomi Tucker, while studying art therapy. They married in 2005, and both work today as therapists.
Tucker has been supportive of Cabrera’s comics journey, albeit reluctantly at first. But it was male model Fabio that we have to thank for CMM. In 2004, after spending a year emulating Harvey Pekar’s serious autobiographical work, Cabrera found his funny bone as a cartoonist after his brother-in-law exposed him to a CD called “Fabio After Dark.”
“It was Fabio giving romance advice,” Cabrera says. “We thought it was ridiculous. I took it and basically re-drew it. And that was my first ‘Crying Macho Man’ piece.”
After several failed title ideas––“A Paro D,” “Oxymoron” ––the phrase “Crying Macho Man” popped into his head and “I had a tingle, like Spider-Man,” he says.
CMM became the vehicle for Cabrera’s weekly dose of online satire. In 2006, he collected the strips in “Prime Cut,” his first trade paperback, and debuted his book at San Francisco’s Alternative Press Expo, discovering a rapid, rabid following for his work.
Beyond San Diego Comic-Con (see sidebar), the Hollywood star-handsome Cabrera is looking forward to his appearance locally, as he has a Pacific Palisades connection: his wife’s family hails from here.
Naomi Tucker’s grandfather, Bill Huntington, was active with the Palisades’ Chamber of Commerce and ran Huntington Realty.
Although Tucker grew up in Iowa, she spent every summer in town.
“My favorite memories include attending Fourth of July parades with my grandma [Jane Huntington]. The view from my grandparents’ house up on McKendree, playing in the ocean, and visiting my Aunt Mary [Huntington, still a Highlands resident] for lunch at the Bel-Air Bay Club,” Tucker says.
As Cabrera’s wife, she has a front row seat to his creative process.
“Jose is driven to create,” she says. “He wakes up early, makes coffee, and sits and draws. His laughing sometimes wakes me up. It gives him joy… and an audience!”
In addition to famous personalities, Cabrera mines humor from the therapy profession and from the corporate world of his past: social worker by day, self-published cartoonist by night, and that’s how he likes it. He’s probably the only guy in town who throws shrink ‘n’ ink parties. Again, strange bedfellows.
Criticism comes with the territory when your satire is as extreme and provocative as Cabrera’s. A woman e-mailed him from Germany to scold him over a strip critical of Governor Schwarzenegger’s policies which, in a reference to his father’s Nazi-sympathizer past, linked the native Austrian to Hitler. At first, such reprisals made Cabrera flinch, “then it hit me. They were writing about me.”
While Cabrera uses shock value to rattle the complacent, he uses it sparingly. By employing racist idioms, he exposes racism. In celebrating classism, he mocks it.
“I’m railing against the comfort that people have with the way things are,” he says. “I’m putting things that are uncomfortable in their face.
“You can’t live in a bubble. This is me putting my hair down,” surmises the bald cartoonist, in yet another apparent contradiction.
“I’m proud of what he’s done,” says Cabrera’s wife. “He cracks himself up all the time, so it makes sense that he would share the wealth!