Carlos Meglia: El dibujante

 

Carlos Meglia y el Webmaster Cybersix´s origin
The characters
Cybersix´s son
The awards

How was the anime born
Meridiana´s angel
TV live-action-series

 


 

Only few times I have lived a moment of such a hard rain, as the one that I lived in the afternoon when I went through an under water Buenos Aires to meet Carlos Meglia, Cybersix´s artist.

I was nervous. It was almost late, and I thought that I could arrive in time taking a taxi. Everything turned out to be wrong: when we were arriving to the address where Meglia has his atelier, we fell into a normally quiet street, but suddenly it had become in a channel from a foreign Venezia, but in my own city (she has another name, Meridiana). Along it, the cars were queuing, going slowly ahead, like punished men walking towards the Death. The driver became very nervous and I thought that Meglia would stay waiting for me, and that the questions I had for him would never be asked... I looked through the window, calculating how many time it would take the water to reach the engine, and invade the vehicule, forcing me to escape to the chaos. Then I saw those people trying to go along the street, guessing the ground under the surface of that dirty, mourble water, feeling with their feet.

Maybe I imagined it, maybe not. I remember I could perceived, by the light of a infernal light ray, a non clear face... a face without neat features... and the light was not enough to dissolve the shadow on his eyes. Suddenly, the driver could get off the car´s queue, and we appeared into a street where the water had just descended. I asked him to stop: I´d walk from there. I paid him, and jumped to the street, with the rain on me, and trying to avoid the street pools, but unable to avoid the strong sensation of that shadower face still looking at me. I arrived at Meglia´s studio at the right hour, no matter the storm.

Von Reichter & Krumens


What I put next are extracts from the conversation we had that day
.

 

Cybersix´s origin


DCero: One of the first question arrived to my web site DIMENSION CERO was: "where did the inspiration for C6 come from?"

Meglia: C6 is script, the main idea, was born because EURA EDITORIALE (from Italy) asked us [Carlos Trillo and Carlos Meglia] for a new comic. They wanted a 12 pages weekly-issue story. It was a nice project... they wanted to compete with BONELLI Editorial, the most important Editorial in Italy (Dylan Dog, Martin Mystere, etc).

DCero: Did they want to increase the sales with the new character?

Meglia: Nowadays I believe that they only wanted to keep the readers they just had by then... but in those days, we thought that the project was only for something like 3 months and no more. And we had only 20 days to create the character.

Carlos Meglia


DCero: Talk about the character, please.

Meglia: Really, my first sketchs were of a girl dressed in man 's clothes trying in that way to enter the Police Department. She wanted to join them because her father had been murdered. And Lucas was her partner [in patrol]. That story was going to be called Black Baby [in English in the original]. Guillermo Saccommano [comic writer, and fiction stories writer, Trillo´s friend] had given the idea for the name.

DCero: Very different from the story we know...

Meglia: Yes. And going ahead with the profile, we added elements, changing things, because our imagination was awaken by so many possibilities. Thus, we added nazis, cloning, etc. And the real character was born. So, we sent it... and around a week later Eura had acepted the story, and we started working on the first chapter. Then, Carlos [Trillo] began to write. I drew it, we sent it, everything was OK.

 

DCero: Too much to draw and very little time to do it.

Meglia: Of course. We had very little time to do it, and a titanic work for me it was in that moment. I worked with assistants, of course, imagine that I used to draw 12 pages each 3 months, and then I started to draw 12 pages a week. Technique helped me too. I had been working in animated cartoons... so I thought to use animation techniques in comic art, using the same backgrounds every time. Just think in Fred Flinstone. Every time he comes into his house, the scene is the same, the same house. In the same way, I have, for example, 4 different views of Adrian, or Cyber´s room. I chose the view I want or I need. The reader can know, at the first sight, that it was Adrian ´s room.

 

DCero: Too much to draw and very little time to do it.

Meglia: I wanted it alive. So, Carlos and I decided to call it by name: Meridiana, which is the city of the daemons. I think it's something from mitology, I´m not sure now... Meridiana is the city where daemons live, in the heart of the Earth. I wanted the city as a kind of Buenos Aires... but strange.... darker.

DC: I noticed something of Buenos Aires in a Meridiana view, a part that´s Water Palace´s back door.

CM: Yes.

Palacio de Aguas Corrientes, Buenos Aires
Una vista de Meridiana

Dcero: I went there in order to get a photo which I placed in my web page, in comparison with a view where Miao is running with his little sister in his arms, in front of the same building.

But now, let´s come back to the story... when did all you told us happen? When was Cybersix born?

 

Meglia: Mmmm... she´s going to be 8 y.o. Carlos Trillo is who has all the data, well written. So, the fact is one month after the Cybersix´s first issue, a lot of letters arrived to EURA EDITORIALE. A mountain of letters! More than 3000 ! So, EURA noted that Cybersix become on a best seller. They were very happy ! The success impulsed them to design a new BONELLI´s 96-pages-comic-book style, a few months after. But, simultaneously with the weekly episodes. So, we worked on 96 pages plus 48 pages for the weekly episodes, each month. (144 pages monthly).

Dcero: What happens with Cybersix today?

Meglia: We had a discussion with EURA. Our lawyers are working on it. So, we are not sending new stories. They are re-publishing old episodes.

Dcero: Oh, I can see...