This is a series of illustrations i made for the book Universal History of Infamy (or A Universal History of Iniquity, original Spanish title: Historia universal de la infamia) a collection of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, first published in 1935, and revised by the author in 1954. The nature of these short stories led to me to make these illustrations like portraits for each story’s hero.
The style I used is heavily influenced by manga comics. I cannot explain exactly why, perhaps because the first story that I read and wanted to illustrate is the one of the widow Ching Shih (actually from this story I made two sketches, Ching Shih and Anne Bonny). Most of the characters (if not all of them) are real. Whenever I could find some real photos i used them as a reference (not always with accuracy). These persons are Monk Eastman (I kept his head shape and his hair), Billy the kid (I used his clothes and I was influenced for his jaw) and Tom Castro.
Anne Bonny is not a hero character of some story and she is only mentioned on a short paragraph in the widow Ching’s story but i really liked her famous quote (there are plenty of sources on the net about it -here from wikipedia).
