So Bobadilla, tell me a bit about where you’re from.

I’m from right here in Culiacan, from Tierra Blanca, a neighborhood famous for being the breeding-ground for drug traffickers in Sinaloa. From there, Alvaro Obregon avenue, which crosses Culiacan, continues into the Sierra Madre, straight to the Golden Triangle [where the states of Sinaloa, Chihuahua, and Durango converge]. So it has always been the route that marijuana and opium takes, and Tierra Blanca was where the narcos started doing business. This is where many of the capos came from. So a lot of my work is the result of what I saw there.

How did Ñacas y Tacuachi come into being?

I’m a big fan of Fontanarrosa, the Argentinian cartoonist who did Boogie el Aceitoso (Oily Boogie), about a CIA assassin. I loved the black comedy in his cartoons and always wanted to do something similar with my cartoons. So what better than doing a series about two hitmen from here? The other main influence is what is happening here in Sinaloa. The sheer impunity we live in, it’s incredible. These kinds of characters can only arise in poisonous breeding-grounds like this.

Where do you get the ideas for the stories?

Sometimes it’s hard to draw cartoons because the things that happen aren’t funny at all. Things that happen every day in Sinaloa. It’s so close to me, sometimes it really affects me. For example, the other day I saw a story in the newspaper about a man whose hands had been cut off and placed in a cooler. At the time, I didn’t find it funny.