Mar 8, 2023

HBO Max's "Poor Devil" can take a big step forward for adult animation from Spain.

Thanks to early efforts from broadcasters like Fox, Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, animated series for adult viewers have been popular in the United States for decades, and producers have been willing to create programming to meet audience demand. They have also created an enthusiastic audience around the world and exported well.

However, in Europe, especially Spain, local animated series aimed at adult viewers took much longer to catch. It's not to say that adult animation is not a Spanish product, shows like the Simpsons and Rick and Morty are very popular there.

It was recently that HBO Max released the first Spanish original animated series from creators Miguel Esteban, Joaquín Reyes and Eresto Sevilla. It changed when I commissioned Poor Devil (Pobre Diablo).

The series turns on Stan, a young man who is about to plunge into adulthood and who happens to be also a literal spawn of Satan. After 665 months of birth, Stan is left only 1 month before he is supposed to fulfill his destiny by plunging all of humanity into complete chaos. The problem is, Stan is more interested in becoming a Broadway star, so he takes a gap month to experience the life of thespian living in New York.

The story may be set in New York, but the series itself feels like it will soon be recognized by fans of Spanish film and television, not just because the characters speak Castellano with a Spanish accent.

"The series takes place in New York, but I didn't want to write from an American perspective because that's what the story demanded," Esteban told Cartoon Brew. "We wanted to tell a story and create a series that came naturally to us, but it was something that anyone could understand.

To tell the story their way, the creators of the show needed a long creative leash, and according to them, Warner Bros. and executive producer Miguel Salvatore happily obliged.

"We were able to keep it original because of the tremendous freedom given to us by Warner Bros.," Reyes explained. "It was important that they trusted us, for the benefit of our story and our characters," he said. I'm so grateful that they trusted us and let us make the show that we wanted to make.

To make the Poor Devil look just right, Reyes designed all the characters himself in a style that has been tweaked over the years. When the show begins, there is a sense of incongruity between the malice of the characters and their friendly, almost stuffed-like design, which quickly becomes apparent.

"When I was designing these characters, I wanted them to have a very friendly look at the beginning to adapt to the story," Reyes explained.

As for the setting and the background, the creators skipped all types of realism and chose to portray New York in the way that most viewers around the world recognized the city, so they recognized it from TV.

One of the major challenges the crew faced when developing the show was to create 1 30-minute episodes. Showrunners had experience writing long live-action episodes, but their animated works had previously been relegated to 5-6 minute short films.

"It didn't make me think about how long the series needed to be," Esteban recalled. "I would have been scared to think that way, and the process would have been too hard to move forward. Our approach was simpler. We came up with stories and characters that were interesting to us and worked from there.

According to Esteban, the show's writers fused their live-action writing expertise with their experience in animated storyboards, applying the visual comedy and code they learned from doing short-form animations to their long-form scripts.

The Poor Devil now stands out as a Spanish novelty, but its creators expect adult animated series made in Spain to become more popular in the future. They believe that the audience wants it, and they know the fact that the artist wants to work on it.

"There are not many works like this in Spain, so the artists were really excited to work with us," Reyes explained. "It was a good combination of promising young talent and established professionals who wanted to do something like this in Spain. We hope that in the near future such projects will be more in the country.”