Cartoon from 11 June 2013, chronicling the major scandals of the construction process of Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara California.
Eugenio Negro is an American satirist, who draws cartoons and writes stories from his homebase San José, California. Both in his art and his writing, he has attacked the ethics, values and persons of the San Francisco Bay Area from within. Negro's work is characterized by an anticonsumerist and anarchist nature, as well as a crude drawing style. Recurring themes are the prison industry, poverty and discrimination.
Comics
Not much is known about the man behind the artist Eugenio Negro, as he prefers to stay out of the spotlights. In a now offline 2015 interview with Eliza Gales, he mentioned that he once worked as a volunteer organizer, and regretted that he didn't become a journalist. In episode #683 of the podcast The Drunken Odyssey (2025), Negro additionally said he never wanted a job: "I came out of high school completely unprepared. I just wanted to be a rock star or a writer. And I've spent the most time of all [developing] the craft skills that I want to make my life out of writing. And I I wrote essays through college so that I could be a better writer and all that kind of stuff." Inspirations for his creative process have been punk rock, alternative culture, Mad Magazine, and Douglas Adams' 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'. Since the mid-2000s, he has been publishing his comics and cartoons in zines and on posters, which he sells in family-owned bookstores throughout the Bay Area. In the 2014-2015 period, he was a regular writer for The Nose Milk, a now-defunct portal for comic journalism and cartoons. His cartoons and writing have also been featured on indie blogs like Defiant Scribe and Indybay.
Novels
Besides cartoons, he has also commented on the downsides of politics and human nature in his fiction novels. 'Almira and the Backward Family' (2015), for instance, was a cynical "western without romance and without honor", set in Gold Rush-era California. The dystopian 'Meat Ladder to Mars' (2016) examined the economic and cultural forces at work in the build-up to the colonization of the planet Mars. The author stayed closer at home for 'Byebye and Shlort' (2019), which addressed the desperate lives of homeless Mexican teens in San José, and criticized the USA's anti-immigrant drift under the administration of President Donald Trump. Negro's 2023 novel 'Despair Priorities' explored the psychological dynamics of four paranoid roommates during the COVID pandemic in San Jose.
Comic strip by Negro from 14 October 2017, critcizing the Mercury News' coverage of the devastating fires in Sonoma and Napa counties. The journalists tended to cover the disaster from the point of view of winery owners, while the personal losses of the largely undocumented workers were overlooked or ignored.