One day, I received a call from Felipe Samper, the art director at SM at the time: he wanted me to do the illustrations for Don Quixote, in an edition adapted to young people. I must confess that, at first, deep down, although I felt flattered by the commission, I felt a huge laziness about meeting again these characters who had become an icon of a self-absorbed and self-satisfied Spain that had never read the book. I had read the book when I was a teenager, but reading it was particularly memorable for me. I got to work. Since I had a reasonable amount of time to complete the project, the first thing I did was buy the Francisco Rico edition. I searched, in vain, for some description of the main characters that would allow me to break with the canon established, among others, by Doré, with a tall, thin, grey-haired Don Quixote and a short, chubby Sancho Panza. I had to surrender to the evidence that any attempt to defraud the reader's expectations regarding the appearance of the characters would have been a graphic whim without any conceptual or narrative support. The first sketches I sent were tremendously boring: I had not been able to escape my own prejudices. A few drinks of Venezuelan rum later, accompanied by the reading of new chapters of the book, helped me find the right tone, which necessarily involved losing the sacred respect for the literalness of the text and clinging to the blessed madness of the old gentleman and his squire, taking all the liberties that the rhetoric of the image allows one. The second reading of this classic was, this time, delightful. Since then, I have not stopped frequenting it.