In the photo session for one of the last interviews he gave to La Vanguardia, Francisco Ibáñez began to draw his famous Mortadelo and Filemón on the glass of a window of the Penguin Random House publishing house in Barcelona. The photographer had requested it, to capture the cartoonist and his characters in the same image in this way. So it was. But he also caught something that was not expected: the cartoonist’s smile. The photos show an octogenarian Ibáñez, with more than 65 years of career behind him, happy while he profiles the famous T.I.A. agents. It is a sincere and spontaneous smile. Because at that moment he is no longer posing but doing what he likes: drawing. Those who knew him well remember what he invariably responded when asked if he had thought about retiring: “And what am I going to do if I retire? Watch TV all day? For that, I better keep drawing.” And so he did it. Until the last moment, he continued writing scripts for new adventures of Mortadelo and Filemón and continued drawing all their pages in pencil and the fully finished covers: pencil and ink, even with the texts labeled in his own handwriting.
The recent death of Francisco Ibáñez, on July 15, at the age of 87, forces us to review the work of this prolific author who is probably the most read in our country. He is also one of the authors who has contributed the most to creating new readers, much more effectively than any book promotion campaign. Although his audience is not only children or youth. In 2019, on that social network then called Twitter, the novelist Arturo Pérez-Reverte claimed, with his usual vehemence, the Cervantes Prize for the father of Mortadelo and Filemón: “They seem to me to be the greatest genius of Spanish comics. And those who go around looking for artificial Cervantes awards even under the stones should give Ibáñez the one he has deserved for so long.” In that same year, another renowned novelist, Javier Cercas, joked in El País about the influences of writers: “We all talk about how much Shakespeare and Cervantes have influenced us (…), but perhaps the one who has truly influenced us is Ibáñez ”.
He never received either the Cervantes or the Princess of Asturias prize – despite the popular campaign that proposed it – but statements like these confirm that Ibáñez achieved something perhaps even more difficult: a transversal acceptance of his work by readers of any age and condition. . And there is only one way to achieve such wide recognition and for so many decades: with a quality work. If we had to stick with one word to explain this success, that word would be humor. Or better yet, that somewhat older term but that the cartoonist himself used to use in all of his interviews: the gag. Ibáñez is a master of the gag. And all of his work is an enormous mechanism to chain one gag after another.
In this article we analyze some examples of his ability to make us laugh and that is where those mechanisms that Ibáñez puts in place to make humor work appear, because it is not just about having a funny idea but about putting it down effectively on paper. Ibáñez knew how to do it from the first moment because he was a great storyteller. A narrator who used cartoons to write his work.
The time has come to vindicate the plastic value of Ibáñez’s drawings, the narrative talent of his comics, the unstoppable dynamism of his characters, the capacity for synthesis to portray an attitude in a few strokes; It is necessary to appreciate the compositional effectiveness of his vignettes because even the most apparently simple ones show the author’s wisdom in distributing all the elements in the best possible way. Ibáñez has a graphic language that is part of his style as an author, of his artistic voice. We see it in the insults transformed into graphic representations – lightning, thunder, clouds –, in the perspective of their crowded covers, in the texts of onomatopoeias, explosions or album titles – a prodigious example of lettering –, in the physiognomy of the characters, in Mortadelo’s costumes, in the animals that move as if they were human.
However, Ibáñez’s drawing is not there to exhibit his virtuosity, it is not intended to gloat in the graphic part. The objective of the drawing is to serve as a conveyor belt for humor, for gags. Francisco Ibáñez wanted his readers to laugh at his comics. Today we know that the affection shown by readers after his death confirms that he achieved it and that is why we will always associate his name with a smile. In this case, ours.
