It's Toon time, baby...
Los dibujos animados son la neta del planeta.
Desde siempre me han acompañado y me han nutrido el coco.
El inconmensurable panteón de personajes que ha hecho mundialmente famosas a la mayoría de las series televisivas- Porky, Daffy Duck, The Roadrunner, Birdman, Galaxy Trio, Mightor, Young Samson, Here Comes The Grump, Ren and Stimpy, Superfriends, The Pink Panther, Shazzan, Bugs Bunny, Moby Dick, Marine Boy, Triton, Scooby Doo, The simpsons, The Lone Ranger, Adventures of Young Gulliver, Valley of the Dinosaurs, Thunderbolts, Space Ghost, Space Angel, Jonny Quest, Clutch Cargo..ufff- ha sido desde siempre mi natural abrevadero, el eje de mi esfera imaginativa.
Muchos de los rasgos de mi inspiración creativa provienen precisamente de todos ellos y, por qué no decirlo, buena parte de lo que hago en la actualidad se originó bajo su influencia.

Su magia me ha resultado siempre y por demás inspiradora.

Crear la ilusión de vida y de movimiento, de espacio y de tiempo, de anatomía inverosímil y de historias a todas luces insólitas, a partir unicamente de simples trazos de lápiz, son algunas de las cosas que hasta la fecha me siguen cautivando.

La mayoría de los títulos que recuerdo de mi infancia han quedado ya en el baúl de la nostalgia.

Muchos de ellos- ahora se los llama Retro toons- han cedido el paso a series nuevas que poco o nada tienen que ver con la calidad de antaño.

Pese a contar con una auténtica evolución en cuanto a las técnicas y a los equipos de animación dígital, algunas series de la actualidad son sosas y demasiado absurdas, simplonas por decir lo más.

Pareciera de pronto que han renunciado a los elementos básicos que dieron vida a la industria: buenos argumentos y carismáticos personajes.

Habrá algunos que en la actualidad puedan rescatarse quizá por su hilarante creatividad, por su originalidad o bien por su explosiva acidez para cautivar al espectador, pero los buenos tiempos de los dibujos animados, me parece, ya pasaron-Sniff-.

Como un diminuto homenaje por todas aquellas inolvidables tardes de mi infancia cuando los sintonizaba en la T.V. y por todo cuanto aportaron a mi imaginación - desvirtuando de paso también mi conciencia, claro- me atreví a ponerle garabatos a unas lineas de texto que tenía como apuntes de una historia.

¿ El resultado? Una solitaria página para El Chamuco en su edición número 182 bajo esta premisa, bajo el rubro toon .

Como tal se publicó y el ejemplar empezó a circular a partir de hoy en los quioscos de revistas.

Tardíamente lo confieso: los dibujos animados de mi infancia me marcaron para toda la vida.

Quizá por eso hago comics.

Porque a final de cuentas, los comics no son otra cosa que dibujos animados en estático y a contramano, los dibujos animados son comics...en movimiento.

La peste...

Nos abarrotaron hasta la náusea con su versión de la clase y el tipo de país que necesitamos, nos inflamaron el lóbulo izquierdo del cerebro de la cabeza con su burlona publicidad..nos saturaron con negros avisos de hecatombes socioeconómicas si los buenos gallos no ganaban, nos colmaron el plato con promesas contrarias a toda lógica, con entelequias, con un dedo nos enatolaron con mentiras manoseadas una y otra vez, con poses y con miles y miles de sonrisas baratas. Lo peor del caso es que todo ese circo mediático lo terminamos pagando eternamente los ciudadanos de este país y, más grave aún, lo pagamos con los impuestos que se nos cobra por tener la manía de trabajar. Con todo, este ciclo se repite de cuando en cuando y el mensaje implícito pareciera ser una y otra vez el de que todo cambie para que todo siga igual ...Lamentablemente la maquinaria de la manipulación político-propagandística funcionará siempre a la perfección -Sniff-... y siempre estará ahí, perfectamente lubricada, para cuando se la requiera. Para desenmascararlas, para decirnos lo que se esconde tras de las campañas políticas, ¿ quién mejor que un super -antihéroe?. Para ello y en este caso ...El capitán Gangrena...En el Chamuco edición número 177 nos enteramos de su puño y letra, de algo que los seres libres sospechaban desde un principio...

Si no quieres que se sepa, no lo hagas...
Para empezar esta entrada, una verdad de Perogrullo: Todos, absolutamente todos, mentimos.
En el mundo en el que vivimos, resulta muy peligroso en ocasiones demostrar nuestra verdadera personalidad a todo el mundo.
Y aunque por todos lados nos dicen que debemos mostrarnos siempre decentes, respetuosos, tolerantes, democráticos, educados, agradables y...sinceros, la verdad es que pareciera ser que esas mismas personas que nos recomiendan esta retahíla de buena educación, las más de las veces, son en verdad la otra cara de esa moneda.
Muchos de ellos, aunque se comporten públicamente de esta manera, en lo privado son, al mismo tiempo, tramposos, arteros, engañosos, falsos, embusteros...
Inclusive existen libros escritos expresamente para sugerirnos el uso adecuado de un sin número de máscaras sociales y a llevar un compendio de trucos, artimañas y engaños siempre bajo el brazo.
A ciencia cierta, ignoro si el engaño y la simulación estan exentos de figurar en aquel célebre manual de Carreño sobre las buenas costumbres, o si alguna disciplina las ha etiquetado ya en nuestros días como algo sucio o inmoral.
Lo único que sé sobre el tema, es el daño enorme que provoca la mentira.

Desde luego no me refiero a aquellas mentirijillas de los niños sobre la marca de sopa favorita o de la sarta de engañifas de un producto de la T.V pronunciadas con la mejor de las sonrisas por un carismático locutor y que de alguna manera, están ya socialmente aceptadas.
Un director de cine, un publicista, un escritor o un guionista, yo mismo por ejemplo, vivimos de escribir y cobrar por nuestras mentiras...
Pero no, no me refiero a eso, a la mentira simple.
Hablo de aquellas que duelen, aquellas que se elucubran con la única y malsana intención de provocar daño en el receptor, aquellas que se perpetran en el callejón más recóndito del cerebro y que con toda la saña del mundo, se traman de principio a fin, dejando la menor cantidad de cabos sueltos, como la de los asesinos, la de los políticos, la de algunos hombres del poder...
El mero acto de hacerlas pasar como verdad suele hacernos felices por un tiempo, pero una vez que nos damos cuenta que hemos vivido bajo la enredadera de la mentira, el despertar suele ser un trago muy amargo. Eso todos lo sabemos.
Actores, vendedores de seguros, de autos, lecheros, internautas, deportistas de alto rendimiento, funcionarios públicos, maestros, lideres sindicales y un largo etcétera lo hacen todos los días y parece no pasar nada.
Lo grave del asunto viene cuando esas mentiras aterrizan en nuestro patio trasero, cuando nos damos cuenta de haber bebido mucho tiempo de la vasija del engaño...Y cuando pareciera que nos hemos cansado ya de preguntar por la verdad una y otra vez ...siempre nos toparémos con el hermético muro del consabido embuste, sólo para intuir luego que quizá ese muro se derrumbará algún día.
Las mentiras, amiguitos y amiguitas, siempre, siempre se descubren.
La verdad aunque dolorosa, siempre será la mejor opción de andar por esta vidorria.
El titulo de esta entrada se refiere precisamente a eso, y es una de las consejas más maravillosas que recibí en vida de un hombre increiblemente sabio, mi abuelo.
A resultas de aplicar esta frase como norma de vida personal y desprovista del tufillo de toda moralina, se me ocurrió escribir esta historieta con un cavernicola de por medio, que como tal y con tintes políticos, apareció en las páginas del Chamuco No. 179.


El mismo Roberto Gómez Bolaños- Chespirito -lo puso en boca de su personaje El Chavo del 8 alguna vez:
" La mentira nunca es buena, mata el alma y la envenena".
¿ Será?

Mi árbol y yo...
Me encantan las jacarandas. Amo las jacarandas. Me maravillan las jacarandas.
No existe en la tierra -creo-un árbol tan explosivo, tan lleno de color y tan inspirador como el de la jacaranda. Cuando llegan, todos saben que se aproxima una temporada llena de calor, de aromas y de colores... Y cuando se van, sabemos también que todo lo que decoraron e iluminaron durante el verano comienza a marchitarse...
Las avenidas tan llenas de movimiento y de bullicio se oscurecen sin ellas , se tornan grises...las casas que tienen la suerte de contar con una de ellas en sus patios, se transforman de pronto en construcciones insípidas...los andadores se quedan vacíos de los visitantes que acudían a admirarlas...los enamorados durante algún tiempo ya no se harán arrumacos ni promesas bajo su sombra...los chicos no rodearán más su tronco con sus juegos...algunos ancianos lectores, viejos conocidos suyos, confiarán a lo sumo en llegar con vida al próximo ciclo para saludarlas de nuevo...los parques públicos se vuelven anodinos...sin chiste...

Me encantan las jacarandas.

Hace unos días tomé mis bártulos de trabajo, caminé unas cuadras hasta una concurrida avenida llena de estos árboles tropicales y me senté junto a la más hermosa de sus niñas...Bajo su espectacular sombra y armado via auricular con Blue Spanish Eyes y Release Me de Engelbert Humperdinck, acabé con verdadero deleite con un habano Cohiba, obsequio de unos amigos recién desempacados de la isla, y de un solo jalón terminé los bocetos, la historia y el trazo a lápiz de esta pieza de la saga Harumm Scarumm para el Chamuco.

Pues bien, esta semana apareció la edición 181 de la revista, y entre sus páginas, mis editores tuvieron a bien insertar el producto de esa solitaria tarde de inspiración.
Quizá algunos hubiesen esperado encontrar en este espacio una profunda disertación sobre los resortes de esta historia.

Pues no.

Esta vez sólo apuntarémos la anécdota que la originó y la conformó. Ojalá y la disfruten...

A los amables 3 lectores de este blog les recomiendo adquirir su ejemplar y disfrutarlo una tarde de estas...bajo uno de estos esplendorosos árbolitos.

Es posible que todavía subsista alguno de ellos por ahí...
Por cierto, amo las jacarandas, me encantan las jacarandas...No recuerdo haberlo dicho...¿ o sí..?

El peor de los infiernos.
Entre todos los pecados capitales, uno quizá sea el peor: El de la envidia, un pecado sin ganancia: el lujurioso consuma su estado libidinógeno de alguna manera, el avaro custodia sus ganancias con fervor, quien padece de gula, la busca saciar de manera interminable...El envidioso con frecuencia, se reseca en su propio martirio.
Un sub- derivado de este pecadillo quizá sea asimismo el de la venganza.
Buscar y no lograr en ocasiones lo inalcanzable deriva muchas veces en frustración y tras ella, se sucede el mezquino ánimo del desquite.
Porque para ser bueno se requiere de un verdadero esfuerzo, de un compromiso en ocasiones estrechamente ligado a la virtud, a la consabida renunciación...a la auto contención, sólo que a un costo muy elevado...
Como dijo Nietzsche : " El valor de una cosa a veces no radica en lo que se logra con ella, sino en lo que se paga por ella, es decir, lo que cuesta".

Por otro lado, para cometer un acto de venganza no hace falta más que el deseo de hacer daño. En consecuencia, la venganza-como justa derivación de todo pecado- es un placer.
Envidia y venganza, motivos permanentemente ocultos entre los políticos y sus intrigas, moneda corriente entre los corredores y pasillos del poder, evidentes muestras de persuasión latente entre quienes mueven los hilos del poder, lo tengan o lo busquen.
Dentro de la saga Harumm Scarumm, al igual que en la vida real, la dinámica del poder con base en estos elementos no podía presentarse de otra manera.
Ahí, el juego cortesano de aniquilar con una sonrisa, de mentir a ultranza hasta conseguir lo anhelado, llegando incluso al extremo de despedazar al rival con el propósito de lograrlo, es demasiado parecido a nuestra realidad.
Sobra decir que la política se nutre -en ambos mundos -de la mismas sustancias.
El sacerdote católico August Clayton, confesor de buenos y malos, de hombre próbos y de recalcitrantes envidiosos, conoce a uno de los peores embusteros del universo de Harlem - Roul Roullie- y cae en el juego del poder de uno de los harlemitas más viles: Dakota Slim, un político sin escrúpulos y dueño de funerarias quien nunca ha vacilado en fomentar el crimen entre las calles del guetto, en pos del negocio...

Esta historia -junto con algunos de los resortes de este choro- salió ya a la luz entre las páginas del Chamuco en su edición número 178.
En ella, el reverendo Clayton, obligado a abrir los ojos por el titán de Harlem, al final descubre algo que quizá como hombre religioso ya intuía: El reino de Hades no se encuentra muy alejado de la realidad...
El y sus feligreses, él y todos los inquilinos de Scarumm al ser inoculados con el aguijón de la frustración, de la envidia por conseguirlo todo a toda costa, del anhelo del desquite, están más cerca del infierno de lo que parece...
¡Ay,nanita!

Who stole the soul of the boy from Indiana?
Michael Jackson has gone from boy wonder to circus freak in his 40-year career, with stints en route as 'king of pop', messiah figure and public enemy. How did it happen, and can we expect yet another incarnation when he takes to the stage in London for his comeback concerts next month?
with the majority: yes, Michael Jackson - who next month emerges from a long retirement to perform a unique extended series of gigs at the O2 Arena in London - is the most interesting human being on the planet. But which planet? Addressing a biographer in 1995, he issued a taunt that might have been a confession: "Just tell people I'm an alien from Mars." And - given Jacko's tinkering with his body and his migrations between gender and race - exactly how human is he? In his childhood, as the freakily talented leader of the Jackson 5, he was often described as a 45-year-old dwarf. Now, almost 51, he looks more like a decaying infant, who speaks in a pre-pubescent whisper while concealing the evidence of time's assault behind an assortment of surgical masks, coy Islamic veils, and Jackie O-sized dark glasses, with a black umbrella to protect his improbably pallid skin from the sun.
Jackson is a biological conundrum. For a while it seemed he might be what Darwinian science called the missing link. He exists halfway between ape and angel, tenuously attaching us to our primitive origins while evolving towards a post-human future. His best buddy in the 90s was Bubbles the diapered chimp, who slept in a crib in his bedroom. But he also smoochily bonded with a mascot who seemed like a preview of a future when our sordid internal organs will be replaced by electronic gadgetry. Recording a song for a spin-off from Spielberg's E.T., he cosied up to the gnomic robot: "I kissed him before I left. Next day I missed him". One of his concerts in the 1980s concluded with a rocket launch, which made it look as if Jackson were being propelled out of the arena in a burst of pyrotechnics. Fired upwards into the night sky, he was, like E.T., headed home; the moonwalker belongs in outer space, unencumbered by the gravity that tethers the rest of us.
In his "Thriller" video, directed by John Landis, he regresses to a werewolf, a fiend in a red leather biker jacket. But this ravening beast also sees himself, in other moods, as a heaven-sent evangelist. After "Thriller" he appeared in Captain Eo, a film Coppola directed for the custom-built cinemas at Disney's theme parks. Here Jackson commands a spaceship whose crew includes a bicephalous navigator, a pair of cybernauts and a shipmate with an elephant's trunk; clad in shining white like a Tennysonian knight of the Grail, he has a mission to disseminate peace. How can you play both a fanged demon marauding through the jungle and a saviour descended from the starry heights without puzzling over who or what you really are?
Estranged from his venal, feuding family, in reclusive retreat from his predatory fans, Jackson has lived from an early age with a sense of his own peculiarity. He is bewildered by what he calls "normal people"; he once said he preferred the audioanimatronic puppets in his amusement park at Neverland to "real people" because they didn't grab at his clothes or pester him for autographs. His performance as the scarecrow in Sidney Lumet's The Wiz, released in 1978, touchingly conveys this separateness. He hangs from a wooden cross like a tatterdemalion Christ, and whimpers as the beaked crows pester him. Eased to the ground, he flops around in legless incompetence. Though his dancing is instinctive, he has difficulty learning how to walk. In the witch's sweatshop he is briskly dismembered, his straw-stuffed limbs hurled around the room. (Jackson knew what this might feel like. When he and his brothers arrived at Heathrow in 1972 they were set upon by maenadic teenyboppers, who tore clumps of hair from Jermaine's scalp, robbed Michael of a shoe and almost choked him by tugging the opposite ends of his scarf.) The scarecrow's make-up was a nasty parody: Jackson sports a bulbous plastic nose, a reminder of the feature that his brothers so cruelly teased him about. But this camouflage both concealed and revealed who he was, and he often travelled home from the studio wearing the scarecrow's outsize nose and his bristly wig of steel wool.
The scarecrow is pathetic because he feels less than human. Peter Pan, another/Jackson alter-ego, shares this quandary: are immortality and the freedom of the air really preferable to the grounded comforts of mortal life? Stranded inside a redesigned body, Jackson has never been sure what species he belongs to. Hence his affinity with John Merrick the Elephant Man, whose skeleton he apparently attempted to buy in 1987 from the medical college where it is held. Doctors attribute Merrick's deformity to Proteus syndrome, a malfunction in cell growth that causes bones to armour the body in grotesque lumps and flesh to sag in spongy polyp-like protrusions. Proteus was the shape-changing god, able to revise his form at will. With his nose jobs and the self-hating diet that has left him weighing less than nine stone, Jackson prohibits his own body from rebelling against him as Merrick's did. But he too is a protean character, a specialist in mutation and metamorphosis. These days, he is a celebrity derisively celebrated for his quirks and crazes, for his health problems, financial crises and legal embarrassments. It's worth recalling why the fuss started, so many decades ago. Back then he was a great performer, a virtuoso possessing skills that seemed almost supernatural, and at his frenetic best he illustrated what the Victorian psychologist Havelock Ellis meant when he said, "To dance is to imitate the gods".
A filmed memento of the 10-year-old boy's Motown audition in 1968 remains astonishing. As he sings James Brown's "I Got the Feeling", he channels an erotic energy of which he can have had no knowledge; as he dances, he shimmies, swivels and backslides across the floor in a blur of independently operating limbs, triumphantly demonstrating that the human body can be an instrument, not just a dumb appliance. His performance of "Billie Jean" at a Motown television reunion in 1983 is a kind of apotheosis. He moves in a blitz of static electricity, shaken from the spangles encrusting his socks, his jacket and his single glove. One moment he mimics the plaintive open-handed gesticulation of a warbler in a minstrel show, next he jabs the air with high kicks like a martial-arts boxer. The glottal hiccups of his vocal delivery, exploding into high-pitched spasms of delight, exactly match the jerks of his torso. This is less showbiz than a voodoo rite, executed by a demented dervish.
He begins "Billie Jean" with a series of pelvic thrusts, and his right hand spends most of the time clutching his crotch or investigatively groping in his trouser pocket. Although the choreography is blatantly sexual, it's impossible to imagine Jackson dancing with a partner. He is auto-erotic, and in "Billie Jean" the male and female halves of his persona - the arrogant sidewalk rowdy who rakes an imaginary comb through his sleek hair, and the glittering, girlish dandy who twirls on tiptoe like a ballerina - perform a duet, announcing their fusion in those ecstatic throaty gulps.
Fred Astaire remarked with acute insight that Jackson was "an angry dancer". But angry at what? Perhaps at the fans who challenged his autonomy by wanting to mate with him: the song repudiates Billie Jean's claim that he has fathered her baby. Its lyrics also vent anger against a world that traduces Jackson and, in his view, makes him a martyr. "Be careful what you do," he warns with the upraised finger of a lecturer or a holier-than-thou preacher, "because a lie becomes the truth." In this respect he ought to be the object of his own anger, since many of the fictions he later so bitterly denounced - for instance the claim that he slept in a hyperbaric chamber because this would help him to live to be 150 - began as stories he invented or licensed his publicists to spread. Jackson has acknowledged that for him truth is slippery and relativistic. A lie told about his image, he once said, "wasn't a lie, it was public relations". Where does that leave the indignant assertions in his 1993 interview with Oprah Winfrey, when he swore that he didn't bleach his skin, or in the 1994 television broadcast he made to rebut accusations of child abuse and protest his "complete innocence"? After all, these were exercises in public relations, attempts to repair a soiled image.
By then Jackson could not tell the difference between truth and wishful thinking. Fame and wealth had turned him into an exorbitant American romantic, a dreamer who, like Gatsby or Citizen Kane, used money to make fantasies materialise before his eyes. JM Barrie imagined Neverland, the resort where Peter Pan sheltered his lost boys; Jackson actually constructed it, with carousels and rollercoasters, giraffes and pythons, free sweets in the cinema and recessed hospital beds so that terminally ill children could watch Disney films while remaining hooked to their intravenous tubes.
When, in 1993, 13-year-old Jordy Chandler's family brought charges of child sexual abuse against him, Jackson was incredulous. "I can't believe this is happening to me, Michael Jackson," he said, viewing himself as a third person. Lashings of cash had always bought him love: during his interview with Oprah, Elizabeth Taylor strolled on to sing his praises, and later received a diamond necklace. Now the expenditure of a few million dollars kept vexatious reality at bay, persuading the Chandlers to withdraw their case.
Despite this outcome, and despite the victory sign he gave to his fans outside the courthouse during his trial for abusing Gavin Arvizo in 2005, Jackson was effectively destroyed by these scandals. His downfall came when the police, investigating Jordy's reports of genital blotches, photographed his private parts. He called the ordeal "humiliating" and "dehumanising"; in fact the examination humanised him, humbling him by unpeeling illusions and reducing him to parity with the rest of us - odd, imperfect, but miserably unmysterious, with mottled testicles, patchily discoloured buttocks, wispy pubic hair, and a peekaboo penis that may or may not (the forensic observers disagreed) be circumcised. Jackson forfeited his divinity at that moment.
Yet this was when, in a bid for rehabilitation, he began to deify himself all over again as a healer and redeemer. In "Beat It" he had averted war between two street gangs by coaxing them to dance not fight; empowered by the video, he assumed he had a duty to pacify and purify the world. "We're healing LA right now," he told Oprah. "We've already done Sarajevo." Jackson always treated his concerts as rehearsals for the second coming: on his 1984 tour a voice from the echoing beyond inaugurated the revels by ordering the resurrection of the dead - "Arise, all the world, and behold the kingdom". The kingdom that was coming turned out to be a Disneyfied kindergarten. "I try to imitate Jesus," Jackson said as Oprah reverently nodded. He added: "I'm not saying I am Jesus", inserting a brief pause for protests by his apostles. "But I try to follow his teaching - to be like the children."
Being like them, as Jackson explained to Martin Bashir in 2003, meant sharing a chaste bed with them. It also entailed begetting children of his own, presumably bypassing the conventionally messy route: a test-tube is the modern version of parthenogenesis, at least for the father. "I have been blessed beyond comprehension," said Jackson after taking delivery of his first child, roughly paraphrasing the Virgin Mary's line when the angel announced that the Holy Ghost had rented her womb. Wanting sole credit for the miracle, he spirited Prince Michael out of the hospital five hours after the infant emerged from the body of Debbie Rowe, the dermatological nurse to whom he entrusted his seed. He was so keen to make off with his daughter Paris, born in 1998, that he hurtled away with her before the placenta was wiped off.
Once he had been content to imitate Christ; now, as a parent, he felt entitled to behave like God the Father. In 2002 he dangled his third child, Prince Michael II, from a third-floor hotel balcony in Berlin. It looked as if he was about to sacrifice the struggling bundle, offering it as a morsel to be gobbled up by the voracious fans down below. In 1987 he wrote a letter to People magazine complaining about his mistreatment by the tabloids. Its conclusion could be the unspoken soliloquy of Christ writhing on the cross: "I must endure for the power I was sent forth by, for the world, for the children. But have mercy, for I've been bleeding for a long time now." At the press conference earlier this year to promote his London concerts, the few words Jackson consented to utter were chosen with care, and they might have been a direct translation from the Latin Vulgate of St John. "This is it," he said, "this is really it, this is the final curtain call." With the addition of the theatrical metaphor, these are the last words of Christ, who announced his expiry by gasping, "Consummatum est".
What kind of consummation, I wonder, is Jackson promising? An onstage breakdown, or a triumphant resurrection? Will he levitate, leaving only a single glove or a prosthetic nose behind in the empty shrine? "They desire our blood," he said in the self-flagellating testament he sent to People. Yes, they certainly do. If you think about the motives of a society that has turned entertainment into a bloodsport and talent quests into public executions, the spectacle of Jackson unravelling is shameful for both him and for us. And if you recall what a genius he once was, it is nothing less than tragic.
A life less ordinary
1958 Born in Gary, Indiana.
1966 He and his brothers perform at a school talent competition. The school's orchestra teacher mentors the group, suggesting the name the Jackson 5.
1968 The Jackson 5 sign a lucrative deal with Motown Records, and go on to be one of the world's biggest pop acts in the 70s.
1982 Thriller is released. It sells more than 100 million copies and remains the best-selling album of all time.
1988 Neverland, Jackson's amusement park and ranch is built.
1993 He is accused of child sexual abuse by 13-year-old Jordan Chandler. A $22m lawsuit is settled out of court.
1994 Marries Lisa Marie Presley. She files for divorce two years later.
1996 Marries nurse Deborah Rowe. They have a son, "Prince" Michael Jr, and a daughter, Paris, then divorce in 1999.
2002 Jackson has a third child, Prince Michael II, via a surrogate mother. He sparks a row by dangling him over a Berlin hotel balcony for fans.
2003 A warrant for Jackson's arrest is issued on charges of sexual molestation. He is acquitted of those charges in 2005.
2009 The 50-date residency at O2 will be his first live shows for 12 years.

Original text by Peter Conrad, taken from The Observer, Sunday 14 June 2009

Adios Michael....( sniff )
Ahora que en casi todo el mundo se ha desatado la Jacksonmanía y que miles de fanáticos le rinden homenajes de pre-culto al llamado -y ahora por fin extinto- rey del pop, Michael Jackson, este espacio no pudo dejar de pronunciarse al respecto...
Sensibles como somos y de la mano de tres de los mejores moneros estadounidenses, servilleta se une a la pena de los miles de fans en todo el orbe ante la irreparable pérdida del astro, con este micro, sencillo, humilde pero muy sentido homenaje...
Va por ti Michael...