You can get ready because I have invented a cool game. It involves a ball and a basket and it’s called basketball
My crazy basketball story
Andrés Jiménez, ‘Jimix’
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Andrés Jiménez (63) is a creator and creators create with premeditation and secrecy, when the lights go out and our dreams light up.
He tells me:
–In the morning I can work on it. But the magic comes out at night.
And what does he work on?
He works on art.
The art of drawing, the stroke, the color, the vignette, the comic, what in his childhood, and in mine, we called a comic book.
When he creates (and even when he doesn’t), Andrés Jiménez is Jimix, and as Jimix he signs this creation that, like a comic prophet, he spreads nowadays: My crazy basketball story (Valnera publishing).
Jimix is big, a 2.06m giant, and in his athlete days, in the eighties and nineties, he was an extraordinary basketball player. He was a 4 as agile and dynamic as a 3, and he won a bunch of league titles with Barça and an Olympic silver with Spain (Los Angeles ’84), and made basketball a premium sport: his light (like that of Epi, Margall, Solozábal, De la Cruz, Corbalán, Romay, Fernando Martín, Chicho Sibilio…) immersed us in the world of those big guys. We idolized them and elevated them in the popular imagination. Suddenly, everything was basketball.
And Jimix, right there in the middle, defending Jordan and pivoting with Ewing.
(“In Los Angeles ’84, when we faced those American college players, bufff… they played an unknown basketball; they were one step ahead and we had no images or videos of them. In Europe, the point guard brought up the ball and started the play by passing it to the two forwards, who were open. But, surprise! Their defensive system blocked the forwards and there was no way to start the play, and I had to come out from the low post to receive the point guard and distribute the ball. What a mess”).
My grandfather had a kiosk; I used to visit him and read his comics, but I couldn’t open them much, because then he had to sell them”
Andrés Jiménez
Illustrator and former basketball player
–And what about Jimix?
–Fernando Martín (RIP) gave me the nickname. His thing.
–How did that happen?
–We’re both from ’62. We met at a youth national team camp. Since I liked comics, I saw him and said: “This guy is Conan the Barbarian”. He didn’t dislike the nickname, not everyone can be Conan… And then he looked at me and thought: “Well, I can’t call this guy Andrés, that sounds dull”. But when he found out I liked Asterix and Obelix, the characters by Uderzo, Jimix came out. And I found it funny and kept it as my own signature.
His own signature: Jimix signed a lot of copies a few days ago, at Sant Jordi. He spent a good while with each reader. He gave them a doodle, quite elaborate. The publishers told him: “Don’t take too long, there’s a line and we have to change spots”.
(He has sold out the first edition of 1,500 copies, the comic is doing very well).
–And where does the vein come from?
–My maternal grandfather, Manuel, had a kiosk. He sold sweets and comics. And when we went to visit him, I would sit down and grab the comics. My grandfather only asked me not to open them much because he had to sell them and they couldn’t look used. And I soaked it all in. And then came the Cola-Cao prize.
–…?
–A Cola-Cao ad said: “Send a drawing of gymnastics things”. And by mail I sent a gymnast on the rings, a bit muscular, and I got a prize, a trifle, a t-shirt or something like that, but those things, to a kid who doesn’t have many inputs, generate excitement.
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And he talks to me about the creative process.
–Before the first stroke, you have to sketch the composition in your head, you have to have the spaces somewhat distributed, and when you already visualize a harmonious thing, then you go for it. Also, the Joso comic school helped me, Josep Solana’s, whom I met at the beginning, in the nineties. He gave me some instructions and encouragement.
And he talks about the hours he has put into the book, how hard it was to compose it, outline it, color it and organize it, about the hours or years since one of his chapters draws from that 1984 Olympic year, it’s a revision of the travel diary he created then and that now, forty-something years later, he has been giving to his adventure companions, one by one.
And when I leaf through the creation, I travel through time.
