Burton & Cub,
Burton & Cub, by Antonio Segura & Jose Ortiz, Catalan Communications
TAKE A blue-eyed blond all-American looking jock and a shifty-looking four-eyed gun-toting cyborg in a space opera setting where they’re galactic conmen seeking riches and quick scams and you have Burton & Cyb, a series created back in 1987 by the popular Spanish pairing of Antonio Segura & Jose Ortiz.
Ortiz’s name became established with UK readers via his artwork on series like Rogue Trooper for 2000AD, having worked un-credited work on other IPC/Fleetway weekly adventure comics, while in the USA he was the most prolific of those Spanish artists who would produced material for Warren magazines, and I for one am still waiting the conclusion of the Don McGregor created Sabre series he was drawing. His work in Europe is much more well-known, and well it should be, not least because his work has been credited there since the 1950s.
Segura became a writer to be reckoned with in the 1980s, working with many top artists, and collaborating on many series with Ortiz.
This 1991 English translation is not their best work, but it’s fun enough in a bombastic throwaway manner if you can pick it up in a bargain box. The pairing of Burton and Cub do their best to fleece galactic despots, alien legions and rocket ship mechanics.
Han Sol and Chewbacca it ain’t but the short stand alone strips could easily have filled the pages of a British comic like Lion or Valiant if those comics had continued in some alternative world.
Whether or not it’s the translation the humour doesn’t always pay off verbally, and yet where there’s a double bluff the stories work better. Ortiz’s art however is quite delightful; the genre allowing his imagine free rein, the colouring giving humour to an art style English speaking readers are more used to seeing sombre tales.
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