When Francisco Ibáñez died, on July 15, he left on the table in his study the pages of the last cartoon of Mortadel·lo and Filemó, Paris 2024. A total of 20 pages in pencil and 19 of dialogues typed by him author Next April 4, the Bruguera label (Penguin Random House) publishes, in Catalan and Spanish, this unfinished adventure as its author left it, without any modifications. Nuria Ibáñez, the cartoonist’s daughter, is a biologist by profession, her working life is spent in a laboratory (“I’m Professor Bacteri”, she says jokingly), but she has taken on the responsibility of looking after her father’s legacy. Coinciding with this editorial event, La Vanguardia receives the studio in the Sant Martí district of Barcelona where Ibáñez worked for sixty years and where he created practically all of his work.
We suppose that it is difficult to talk about this album, many emotions are condensed…
It’s very emotional, yes. It’s a different book. For me it is a treasure. These comics have always been published inked, in color and absolutely finished, many people do not imagine that behind this there is a pencil, that everything starts with a sketch. The day I saw these last pages on my father’s drawing table, I thought this is how they should be published. The raw work.
It is impressive to see the level of finish of the drawing. This album vindicates the work of his father…
Totally. Here we see all the details that characterize his work: the main story, the secondary… it has the same richness as the finished drawing. We see how the pencil drawing progresses to a perfect finish, because he was a perfectionist, he never delivered anything that wasn’t absolutely finished and with all the details. He did not allow any kind of error in his work.
And, on a personal level, what was Ibáñez like as a father?
It was just as fun. He always made us laugh, he was the soul of the family and the parties, who always made jokes. He had a way of being that, even if you were having a bad day, he would make you laugh with his way of speaking…
Did he talk like his characters? Did he say hake and barnacle?
Yes, he spoke in a way you identified with the comics. it was him He also had his bad temper, of course, and then you had better keep quiet, but the next day he had already forgotten everything. He had a great personality and character that filled everything, and now that hole is hard to fill. His absence is very noticeable.
He must have wondered why his father spent so many hours drawing…
Yes. We even told him to stop, but he replied: “And if I don’t do this, what do I do?”. What happened was that his work and his hobby coincided. He swore he would take August on vacation and in the last week he was already thinking of new comics, he needed to keep his head busy. It gave him life. Like an actor who needs to be on stage.
I needed the drawing…
If for some reason he hadn’t been able to draw, I don’t think he would have lived all the years he did. In fact, he was ill for a while, two or three years ago, and I brought some sheets to the hospital for him to draw on, but he was too weak and didn’t think it was good enough. He was fighting until he recovered, he fought to be able to draw again with the stroke and quality he was looking for. Despite going through obstacles, what gave him life was to continue drawing. If he hadn’t been able to return, with the quality he wanted, he would have died alive.
Here in the studio there are many drawings by his colleagues, friends of the historic publishing house Bruguera. We imagine that you knew many of these cartoonists.
Yes, they had house parties and they were a lot of fun. They joked a lot with each other. I was little and I went to sleep, but they continued until the wee hours playing card games surrounded by a cloud of smoke, because they all always had cigarettes in their mouths and the ashtrays ended up full…
Who was in this core of Ibáñez’s friends?
Raf, Gin, Nadal, Tran… also Jan, although they were seen less often. He was a close friend of Víctor Mora and of Macabich i Blanco, from the TBO. And I really remember seeing Escobar, the creator of Zipi y Zape, even though he was from a previous generation.
Now it’s time to manage Ibáñez’s legacy. How do you deal with the management of such a huge cultural heritage? Do you need a foundation? A museum? Have public institutions shown interest?
It is still very early. We are talking about all this and there are several projects. Our intention is that we can all share Ibáñez’s legacy. We don’t want to keep it in a closet. We want to show it. The final formula is still not decided, all these ideas you point to are on the table.
Do you want to make an Ibáñez museum?
I don’t know if it will be a permanent museum or what form it will take. There are many ways to accommodate this initiative and we want to structure it well before making it public. We have time to find the best formula. Many things are wanted to be done from many different areas, but everything cannot be done at the same time. We will step it up and prioritize it. And this does not end in our country, we must also take into account the international dimension, the success that especially Mortadello and Filemó have in countries such as Germany.
Do you have a favorite album?
The first ones, such as La máquina de la changeada, Take it by the horns! and of course The atomic sulfate, which I don’t know how many times we had read. For me, this album is like a work of art and could be a starting point to discover both the work that came after it and the work that came before it. But also Trencasostres, which was his favorite, or 13, Rue del Percebe, with some extremely current characters and situations.
Her father often said that the comics his daughters liked were those of Zipi y Zape, not those of Mortadel·lo. Is it true or is it another joke from Ibáñez?
I have to confess that it was true… [laughs]. But I must also say that that period lasted very little. My sister and I were very young, maybe three and four years old at the time, and we felt very identified with those two brothers.
Will we ever discover something about Ibáñez that he didn’t plan to publish?
At the moment, the unpublished is this Paris 2024. If later on, in a wardrobe, some surprise appears, we will think about it. In any case, we won’t do anything he didn’t want to do. This is the slogan.
Will Mortadello continue in other hands?
Continuity will be to re-release old albums. We have an extremely large fund of material to have new work simply by recalling titles that have not been published for a long time. If, I don’t know when, all this immense work is exhausted, then it could be considered; but not much less is the goal right now. The goal, now, is to make public once again works that many readers go looking for in bookstores and cannot find because they have not been published for years. We have an immense fund, although perhaps it should be published in a different way.
Are there film projects, series, cartoons?
There is a documentary project, but no series, for now. I imagine it will come. Every day we receive new ideas and projects, surely animation will be one.
That would be a way to keep the character alive. With Tintin, its creator said that there would be no new albums after his death, but instead, the reissues of his work multiply, the films…
It is a model of continuity that seems perfect to me. You keep the quality of the character intact and, around it, complement the original story, a story that you’ve reprinted again in a different format and now appeals to both new readers and collectors who find it in a different edition. The Tintin model is a very good example of the idea of ??continuity that we have.
There is a series of originals from the old Bruguera publishing house that Prensa Ibérica has retained in a warehouse in Berguedà. The heirs of Escobar, Vázquez, Raf, Conti or Cifré have demanded its return. Will the Ibáñez family join this request?
Yes, our idea is to be able to recover these originals, those that are there, because we don’t even know how many there are. My father put this on the back burner because he was very pragmatic and not at all nostalgic, he thought about the present and the future, he didn’t want to waste time on things from the past. Perhaps it is his sin, not to worry enough about the past, but instead, he made a firm fight for copyright which from 1987 marks a before and after and which allowed, from then on, that the whole profession had the law on its side.
