He will go down in history for having created one of the most popular and funniest cartoon characters in our country. A lanky bald guy named Mortadelo, a nefarious secret agent but a talented disguise artist, capable of turning himself into any object or animal. However, the great drag queen was always Francisco Ibáñez himself, a tireless worker –he had already handed over some pages of the new Mortadelo y Filemón album to the publisher– capable of drawing everything that crossed his mind during seven intense decades as strip cartoonist.
He created tens of characters and thousands of comic pages, covers or jokes, because Ibáñez was part of those cartoonists who worked tirelessly for the great comics industry, before television, video games or the internet became the new kings. of leisure time. From the first moment, Ibáñez connected with his readers because he made them laugh, because his comics were funny. He first learned from his elders, from Escobar, from Cifré and, above all, from Manuel Vázquez. Ibáñez’s graphic style changed over the decades and here he also demonstrated his skills as a drag queen, he knew how to adapt to the times and editorial impositions, when he was asked to follow the style of Vázquez or approach the most detailed and neat drawing of the Franco-Belgian school of comics in albums like El sulphate atomic.
Starting in 1970, he reinvented his style again and that is where the Ibáñez appeared, who would become the model for the younger generations of cartoonists. Adventures like The Box of Ten Locks, At the Olympiad, The Invaders, The Case of the Sock, or The Bodyguards are just a few of the many titles that came to light in a prodigious decade, the 1970s, which lasted in the next with episodes like Gone with the Wind, In Germany or The Statue of Liberty and that would continue to evolve from these already consolidated bases until its latest episodes, among which Mortadelo de la Mancha, The Little Mermaid, The Treasurer, Elections! o Mission for Spain.
Ibáñez knew how to endow his vignettes with unmistakable speed and energy. It was the dynamism of the silent comic film transferred to the comics. In his hands, the characters run, jump, trip, suffer the impact of terrible explosions. And nothing happens. They may be scorched in one panel but no more, in the next they regain their composure and return to the charge. In his comics there is no time to breathe, there are no pauses. Everything is dynamic, everything is accelerated and everything leads us to humor. Because for Ibáñez, the gag is the raison d’être of all his work. Create the joke through surprise, the appearance of the unexpected, the absurd.
He was a master of humor. A master of the gag –a word he often used– that he made several generations of readers laugh who started reading with the Mortadelo y Filemón, Rompetechos, 13 Rue del Percebe or Pepe Gotera y Otilio comics. There, too, he proved to be a great drag queen because he was able to change the face of thousands of readers and make a smile or a laugh appear on his face.
