One of the outstanding characteristics of [Libro de Manuel] is the blending of fictional narration and journalistic clippings, based on the organizing motif of a sort of baby-book for a revolutionary child compiled as the legacy of his parents and mentors. The novel moves back and forth between being the process of compilation and being the baby-book itself. The result is a noteworthy blurring of the distinction between fiction and documentation, using the materials of popular culture, both highbrow and yellow journalism.

Cortázar's present effort [Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales] is an even more radical step and bespeaks eloquently the concern of the contemporary writer in Latin America to produce a literature that addresses itself to the masses rather than to the educated elite, without being simply a modish and chic exploitation of big-market mass culture. Fantomas is a historieta both in graphic format and in narrative texture. It incorporates cartoons that directly, cleverly and satirically imitate large-selling strips such as Superman or Batman (both examples of American cultural imperialism that have been widely denounced in Latin American). But the cartoon strips that appear in the text contribute to the second-order configuration of a comic book which uses such drawings along with other graphic material and narrative text to make up a unified if defiantly ageneric text. Moreover—and it is in this sense that the structural features of the nueva narrativa are present and attest to the serious preoccupations with literary composition—the text narrates a series of events that occur in the "inner" comic book text as well as in the "outer" reality of the text that describes the former….

[There is] clever satirizing of the Fantomas figure and, in what really amounts to the same context, of the Western writer who is too bound up with his elitist cultural models to be able to distinguish between writing about the problems of the people and writing for and at them. Cortázar's incomparable blend of demythifying humor and a slang that deflates the most serious of cultural pretensions is the major narrative vehicle.

Fantomas is basically documentary in nature and reminds one of the valuable role played by Supermachos and Los agachados in Mexico in the consciousness-raising of their mass audience. (p. 66)