Francisco Ibáñez has drawn a creative career that is as long as it is brilliant, which has marked the history of Spanish comics for the last seventy years, turning his series Mortadelo y Filemón into an icon of our culture, which has crossed borders. His ability to connect with various generations of readers shows both his creative talent and his ability to connect with society from different eras.
I consider myself lucky to have dealt with him at various stages of my career and as director of magazines at Ediciones B, as the former director of my long-awaited Salón Internacional del Cómic de Barcelona, ??curator of exhibitions and, above all, fan of comics. He always downplayed the significance of his work, considering himself a kind of comic Stakhanovite tied to his drawing table.
Sufficient justice will never be done to the hard-working and brilliant authors of the now-defunct Editorial Bruguera, who created a true school of humorous comics where the names of Escobar, Vázquez, Conti, Peñarroya, Raf, Jorge, Segura, Martzh Smith, Cifré or the Ibáñez himself filled times of narrowness and censorship with smiles. His apparently white humor exuded considerable bad milk, where figures such as the head of the office appeared as an unscrupulous exploiter, of whom subordinates were victims who with their occurrences caused real catastrophes in their jobs, whether it was an information agency , a bank or the writing of a newspaper. The tense and suffocating family relationships were also very present. And, always, our hard-working and unfortunate protagonists were scalded at the end of the story.
Francisco Ibáñez belongs to the second generation of Bruguera authors, a publishing house reborn from the ashes of the Civil War in the 1940s. His ingenuity made its way with its own personality, within the guidelines set by the publisher’s editor-in-chief, Rafael González, whose work emulated Hollywood studio directors. Magazines like Pulgarcito, DDT, Din Dan and later Mortadelo or Zipi y Zape filled the kiosks, a point of sale for newspapers and magazines full of color and life, unfortunately today in danger of extinction.
Ibáñez, born in Barcelona in 1936, left his job in the banking sector at a very young age to dedicate himself to his true passion as a ‘ninotaire’. Already at the age of eleven he published his first drawing of him in the magazine Chicos, but it was in Bruguera where he became a professional. On January 20, 1958, he published the first one-page comic of Mortadelo and Filemón in Bruguera magazine. Initially a parody of private detectives, a bit along the lines of Sherlock Holmes and Watson, where Filemón was the grumpy boss and Mortadelo a subordinate capable of causing any catastrophe with his absurd ideas. It was years later when this couple joined the T.I.A., a spy agency commanded by the angry Super and with Professor Bacterio, as a quirky scientist, and Ofelia, a secretary who is not for the jokes of this pair of crooks. Come on, the references to M, Q and Moneypenny from the Bond saga seem obvious. The costumes of the chameleonic Mortadelo provoke funny gags. The album El Sulfato Atómico (1969), a true masterpiece, which could have been subtitled ‘The spy who emerged from laughter’, is the Quixote of the Spanish humor comic. The successful film adaptations have shown the vitality and validity of this series. But the enormous work of Francisco Ibáñez has also given birth to authentic jewels such as 13 Rue del Percebe, whose botch jobs at home are unparalleled.
It is often said that man has left us but not the author and his perennial work, but I will always miss the huge queues that were made at fairs and salons to get a dedication with a drawing included by the master, always grateful to his readers.
