The children of the sixties and seventies spent their savings on comics and, if they were lucky, they got their parents to take them to the kiosk and buy them the new copy of Pulgarcito, Tío Vivo or El DTT, the graphic magazines where Francisco Ibáñez drew in Mortadel·lo and Filemó, characters who would end up having their own publication and would become the biggest phenomenon in the history of Spanish comics.
Ibañez, who died yesterday in Barcelona at the age of 87, taught several generations to read with his funny comics. He was a master of humor who also created Pepe Gotera and Otilio ( chapuzas a domicilio ), the short-sighted Trencasostres (Rompetechos, in Spanish), who was not seen at all, or the lazy doorman Sacarino , who always messed everything up but avoided punishment.
Born in Barcelona in 1936, he studied to become a commercial expert and worked in a bank, but from a very young age he felt a passion for drawing and consumed comics. He was also a fan of Laurel and Hardy and Harold Lloyd movies. So he started painting at just 11 years old and managed to publish some of his cartoons when he was in his twenties. He soon saw that his hobby and his future career were compatible.
At the end of the fifties, he left the bank “with complete happiness”. It was not for him, since “rather than working, I had work, because under my table I had some white papers and I was making my comics; the person in charge poked me on the shoulder when he caught me, that’s why I’m a little down: ‘Ibáñez, one more time?'”, recalled the cartoonist in an interview given to La Vanguardia in December 2021.
After leaving “salaries and those whores” behind, Ibáñez joined the ranks of Bruguera, where he joined an “army” of comic greats such as Escobar, Peñarroya, Cifré, Vázquez and Segura. The publishing house included in its comics the cartoons of Mortadel·lo and Filemó, the disastrous secret agents of the TIA, and also those of the doorman Sacarino or Trencasostres.
In addition, Ibáñez gave life to 13, Rue del Percebe, a super crazy neighborhood, which used to be published on the back cover of these graphic magazines so in demand by the young people of the time. The characters and the chaotic situations of that neighborhood served many years later as the seed for the successful television series Aquí no hay quien viva and La que se avecina.
From the seventies, Ibáñez dedicated himself exclusively to Mortadel·lo and Filemó, his most successful characters. And he began to publish his comics in complete volumes, which fans bought together with the adventures of Tintin or those of Asterix and Obelix, the great comics of the time. The atomic sulfate, Professor Bacteri’s inventions or Los gamberros are the titles of some of those comics that succeeded abroad – never as much as in Spain – and were translated into several languages: “Mortadel·lo and Filemó has been published around the world; sometimes in the translations they have given them names with fourteen or fifteen consonants and a vowel in the middle, the funniest thing was the name they gave them”, joked the cartoonist when referring to his international success.
The adventures of the TIA agents were also turned into animated television series, which did not excite Ibáñez, because “they commissioned them from the Chinese in Macau or I don’t know where and it didn’t turn out well”. And of course they took them to the movies. According to its creator, the best adaptation was “the cartoon directed by Javier Fesser in 2014, Mortadel·lo i Filemó against Jimmy the Catxondo”, although it also did not put any flaws in Mortadel·lo i Filemó, which Fesser make 2013 with real people. Benito Pocino played Mortadello and “it’s not that he was nailed, it was him!”.
In 1985, Ibáñez left Bruguera to join Grijalbo and had to leave his famous characters behind because he lacked the copyright that the publisher retained. A legislative change allowed him to recover his characters at the end of the eighties: “The publisher said they were his and not mine. There were lawsuits and in the end everything was fixed.” In recent years, the cartoonist joined Random House, which made “fabulous prints” of his Mortadellos.
Ibáñez, who worked until the end, had been married since 1966 to Remedios Solera and had two daughters, Sonia and Nuria, who surely learned to read from their father’s comics, like many of the children in the his generation
