2023-07-15 16:36:05
The cartoonist and cartoonist Francisco Ibáñez, creator of ‘Mortadelo y Filemón’, has died in Barcelona at the age of 87, according to The publisher Penguin Random House reported this Saturday through a message on the social network Twitter.
“We bid farewell to the most important figure in Spanish comics”, states the publisher. “He leaves us the enormous legacy of his lucidity, sense of humor and more than 50,000 pages with memorable characters that have made a large number of readers happy.”
In addition to the detective strips ‘Mortadelo y Filemón’, which recently celebrated their 60th anniversary, Ibáñez signed other works that have served to initiate reading for several generations, thanks to the adventures of TIA agents, the anecdotes of the neighborhood community of ’13, Rue del Percebe’ and those of ‘El botón Sacarino’, ‘Rompetechos’ or ‘Pepe Gotera and Otilio’.
It is with great sadness that Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial announces that this morning the great cartoonist and cartoonist Francisco Ibáñez has passed away in Barcelona. + pic.twitter.com/Fr9N1hm25R
— Penguin Spain ???????? (@penguinlibros) July 15, 2023
Born in Barcelona in 1936, Ibáñez is known as one of the “masters” of the profession and one of its most influential. The cartoonist published the first strip of ‘Mortadelo y Filemón’ in 1958, in the magazine ‘Pulgarcito’ from the Bruguera publishing house, which thanked him this Saturday “for making us happy and expanding our ability to laugh at ourselves”.
By the end of his career, he had sold more than 30 million copies of his strips, which have been fondly remembered this Saturday by numerous cultural and political figures. The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, stated on Twitter that “You made life much more fun for several generations of this country. We will miss you, Francisco Ibáñez” and the Ministry of Culture and Sports has celebrated Ibáñez as “an essential figure of Spanish comics” whose characters “have accompanied several generations of readers and will remain forever in the collective imagination”.
The candidate for the presidency of the Government and leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz, has expressed that “few creators have left such a deep mark on the cultural memory of this country,” according to a message posted on Twitter. “It was scathing and funny. We read it for pleasure and we will continue reading it because his work has left several generations with the gift of laughter and wit”.
six decades of success
Since the first adventures of the TIA agents, Ibáñez’s works have been adapted for television and film. And during these six decades, they have also overcome the obstacles of Francoism, lawsuits, the closure of their publishing label and “unfair competition” from politicians -as the author has stated in the past- when it comes to making their readers laugh. .
The cartoonist’s long career, which has led readers who discovered him in his childhood to accompany him for decades, allowed him to include Luis Bárcenas, the former PP treasurer, among the characters in one of the most popular comics in our country, as investigated by its best-known characters, Mortadelo and Filemón’.
We bid farewell to the most important figure in Spanish comics. He leaves us the enormous legacy of his lucidity, sense of humor and more than 50,000 pages with memorable characters that have made a large number of readers happy.
— Penguin Spain ???????? (@penguinlibros) July 15, 2023
In 2015, TVE refused to cover the launch of El tesorero so as not to mention Luis Bárcenas. “When one of these things is done, the result is the complete opposite of what was intended,” he then declared to elDiario.es. “When censorship gets in the way, the only thing it achieves is that the public throws itself more into buying whatever. In other words, I even give thanks for cases like this censorship because in the end I have sold more”.
Ibáñez recently claimed that the best use that should be made of his comics is to help teach children to read, “if they caught a Mortadelo and Filemón they would learn to read sooner”, he pointed out in the presentation of ‘El tesorero’.
The cartoonist has lamented on several occasions the decline of the comic in our country and how the loyal readers who bought his strips every week have been disappearing to the detriment of television and other forms of entertainment.
“The true reader went week after week to buy his collection and this has completely disappeared,” he explained in this interview to elDiario.es. Ibáñez, attributed this situation to the fact that the boys did not have any distractions before and now they have “40,000 programs on television, consoles, computers and video games.”
In 1994, Ibáñez won the Grand Prix of the International Comic Salon in recognition of all his work. In 2002, he was also awarded the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts and two years ago, in 2021, he received the Creu de Sant Jordi from the Generalitat.
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