Pablo Escobar

Self-published collection of political cartoons about Pablo Escobar completed by the author while imprisoned.

• Pablo Escobar (Colombian).
• [Medellin, Colombia: 1992].
• [2]-377, [1] ll., printed rectos only.
• 4to.
• Numerous plates reproducing political cartoons and photographs and drawings of Escobar (four of them in color).
• Original calf with facsimile signature and fingerprint in gilt.

Proof of the law's inability to constrain Escobar surely comes in no stranger format than this self-published collection of political cartoons concerning the Colombian drug trade while serving time in his luxury prison, La Catedral. 

Escobar is quite serious about the value of this work and states in the prologue: "El lengua figurativo de la caricatura representa una opinion, un criterio, un punto de vista personal y es por eso que hemos querido recopilar todos los pensamientos graficos y bajo este tema especifico de narrativa. Porque visualizar un concepto tan abstracto como un modo de pensar, va mas alla de la simple ridiculizacion de un a personaje o la simple expocision de los razgos caracteristicos; es darle vida propia a una imagen abstracta que reposa silenciosa en nuestra mentes."

The book opens with a report on the Colombian government importing of cocaine and reprints a series of photographs of Escobar, some with his family and even some in prison. From there, the wide-ranging caricatures satirize everything from politics, the mafia, religion, the United States and even drug use in sport.

According to an Escobar family member, most of the copies of the book were burned after Escobar’s escape from the prison, with only a handful of copies surviving the fire. 

Rare. OCLC locates no copies, though the book does turn up now and again on a certain online auction site at predictably ludicrous prices.