Green-red, green-red. Thus, 2,160 times a day. Every forty seconds, the pedestrian traffic light located on the corner of Concili de Trento and Treball streets, in the Sant Martí neighborhood of Barcelona, ??alternately shows a Mortadelo in green and a Filemón in red.
Unmistakable.
The first, with his characteristic walks with his arms raised. The second – he had to be standing, naturally – is revealed by his ears and attitude. They are the two comic characters created by the cartoonist Francisco Ibáñez, who died on July 15 of this year, who for the first time have mutated into LED, in a nice tribute to one of the great comic creators.
The traffic light is in front of the brand new Gabriel García Márquez public library and has been chosen precisely for that reason: it has an important collection dedicated to the artist, who was also a resident of the area.
The “inauguration” of the traffic light was simple. The mayor of Barcelona, ??Jaume Collboni, together with Ibáñez’s widow, Remedios Solera, and his daughter Núria, made a cloth fall that protected the light signal. It was 11:08 am. The first to appear was Filemón, although the street was blocked.
The Navarrese professor who had the idea, and whose name is exactly the same as the cartoonist, Francisco Ibáñez, also attended the nice ceremony. He released it to social networks last August, a few days after the teacher died, and in a few hours it went viral. It reached 350,000 retweets.
The administration was unusually agile, and in just two months it has coordinated the family, the publishing house that publishes Ibáñez (Penguin Random House), the general directorate of Traffic (to standardize the signals) and the traffic light manufacturers. The event brought together dozens of neighborhood residents, curious and already fond of the initiative.
Núria Ibáñez joked in a brief speech that for the day to have been complete the only thing missing would have been… for the traffic light to have fallen on the head of a passerby, causing “a bump.” That would have been pure Ibáñez.
“The pedestrian is not going to mind having to wait if it is Filemón who stops him,” laughed the teacher whose lightbulb went off. Collboni celebrated that the idea soon became a popular cry and that, with such speed, “such a special and long-awaited day” had arrived for all Ibáñez fans.
A few meters away, inside the library, dozens of kids were reading Ibáñez’s comics on the second floor. But not only Ibáñez. Every corner of the new equipment – ??floors, under the stairs, the terrace – was packed. Barely free sites. It is noted that it has already won five awards, including this year’s best public library in the world and the FAD for architecture.
Before the end of the year, three more pairs of Mortadelo and Filemón will be distributed at crossroads in Barcelona. One of them will be on Comte Urgell and Manso streets, where the Sant Antoni Sunday market is held, a mecca for thousands of fans of literature in general and comics in particular for decades; another will be on Gran Vía de les Corts Catalanes with Bac de Roda, near where the Ibáñez family lives, and the last, at possibly the busiest intersection in the city, between Ronda de Sant Pere and Passeig de Gràcia.
