The mayor of Barcelona, ??Jaume Collboni, announced today, during his visit to the funeral home, that the city of Barcelona will pay tribute to posthumously award the city’s Gold Medal for Cultural Merit to cartoonist Francisco Ibáñez, who died yesterday at 87 years old. In the act of recognition, the family will be presented with the medal unanimously awarded to the Plenary in February of last year, after the award ceremony could not be carried out at the time.
Collboni wanted to say a final farewell to the illustrious Barcelona cartoonist by attending the funeral chapel installed in the Sancho de Ávila funeral home, where the Barcelona City Council has deposited a wreath on behalf of the city.
The Barcelona mayor has highlighted that Ibáñez “was a person very involved in the associative and civic life of Barcelona, ??who was drawing until the last moment, expressing himself with intelligence and humor, making a social analysis and making so many generations of Catalans and Spaniards think that they even learned to read with their comics.” “The best way to pay tribute to him is to think of that man who always had a kind word, an unwavering sense of humor and a bombproof optimism,” he said. “Many men and women from Barcelona, ??of very different ages, feel this sadness for having lost him and also this joy for having learned so much from him and from his writings and from his characters who are already part of our lives.”
The mayor has advanced that there will be an act of posthumous tribute, with his family, where he will be recognized that it could not be done physically when he was awarded the medal and has ensured that all recognition proposals are made from the city, from entities or from the comic sector, which is a very important part of literature in our city, will be received with the best of intentions by the City Council to recognize such an important figure in comic literature and our lives ”.
The Municipal Council Plenary on February 25, 2022 unanimously approved awarding the Barcelona Gold Medals for Cultural Merit to cartoonists Francisco Ibáñez and Miguel Gallardo, who also died last year.
Barcelona decided to honor Francisco Ibáñez “for his tireless and intense creative career, as a benchmark in the world of humor and comics in our country.” Ibáñez began to develop a great interest in comics and drawing from a very young age. The first publication of a drawing of his came when he was eleven years old, in the magazine “Chicos”, although he studied accounting and commercial expertise and his first job was linked to the world of banking. He soon began to combine it with his collaborations in magazines such as “Nicolás”, “Chicolino”, “Picolín”, “Liliput” or “La Risa”, with strips, jokes, humorous series, creating his own characters or continuing creations by Other authors.
In 1957 he decided to devote himself full time to creating stories and quit his job at the bank. That same year he began to collaborate with the Bruguera publishing house. In January 1958, the first series of Mortadelo and Filemón was published in the magazine “Pulgarcito”, the most iconic characters of him. Between 1957 and 1963 he began a period in which he would establish his own style within Bruguera, creating an infinite number of characters and adapting some of his best series for the different magazines and comics of the publisher: “La familia Trapisonda” (Pulgarcito, 1958). ; “13, Rue del Percebe” (Tío Vivo, 1961); “The buttons Saccharino” (The DDT, 1963); “Rompetechos” (Uncle Vivo, 1964) or “Pepe Gotera and Otilio” (Uncle Vivo, 1966).
Ibáñez has more than 100 million albums sold and is one of the most prolific and well-known Spanish cartoonists. A neighbor of the Gabriel García Márquez de Sant Martí library, inaugurated last year, there is a special monographic collection dedicated to him and his comics.
