I would like Francisco Ibáñez’s funeral to change to death as if it were a vignette from one of his comics. Because if I was convinced that my mother would be immortal, I also thought the same about Mortadelo (Filemón always seemed like a cretin to me). And when the father dies, he also takes all his children with him.
Ibáñez gave us the right to be children, but reading without sweeteners or nuances, without suffering the fears that Disney gave away. In every adventure, Mortadelo gave me his hand to accompany him in the search for atomic sulfate or to try Professor Bacterio’s inventions with him or to go to the soccer World Cups or the Olympic Games, like the 1976 in Gatolandia, where Mortadelo and Filemón infiltrated like sportsmen to try to find the spy from Perrolandia who tried to boycott the Games (I remember the moments that I laughed the most as a child, when Mortadelo rides on a fearful horse in the equestrian jumping tests).
Maybe because Mortadelo and my older brother were born in the same year (1958) I always gave him the new adventure drawn and scripted by Francisco Ibáñez. A fortnight ago, when my brother turned 65, I gave him the latest published book, World Basketball Championship 2023, where the two TIA agents must discover who is shrinking the basketball players who will participate in the championship.
The bald man with glasses has been our favorite pathetic spy in a Spain full of real Mortadelos and where reality competes with the heroes of Ibáñez in comics like The Treasurer. Synopsis: Someone has emptied the Papillary Party safe (literally) and our agents must find the culprit. They explain that it is the best-selling book in a single day in Spain (10,000 copies), probably because the reality is so brutal that no one can believe it.
With the death of Ibáñez, our childhood in the water is gone and the role of the room from when we were children is definitively taken away from us. And in the same way that after watching Titanic for so long I always think that, in the next viewing, Leonardo DiCaprio will not drown, I hope to get up tomorrow morning and discover that Mortadelo in the last vignette does not die, he is faking it.
