This has to be my most obscure joke, even for my few spanish readers, but I’m having it here for completeness sake.

Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959) was a world renowned mexican intellectual, essayist and diplomat: the pride of my city, Monterrey, Nuevo León. A month ago, a contest invited current students of a prestigious university to create a cartoon, comic or animated short inspired by the life and works of Alfonso Reyes. Sadly, I’m merely an alumnus of said university, so I was ineligible to participate.

My wife and I joked that my only true contact with Reyes work were his translations of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, anyway. And well, yeah, swamped as I was with dozens of novels and textbooks to study during my first semester, I was indebted to Reyes’ foreword of The Iliad, as it bought me some time until I read the thing properly.

So I did the comic anyway. I mean, I was a shoo-in to win the contest, wasn’t I?

Cheers!

–Pedro Arizpe