2023-07-15 20:22:22
Mortadelo and Filemón have been orphaned. Its brilliant creator, cartoonist Francisco Ibáñez, died this Saturday in Barcelona at the age of 87. With more than 50,000 pages published, he is the most relevant comic figure in Spain. Those in charge of giving the sad news have been the members of the Penguin publishing house, who highlight the “enormous legacy of his lucidity and senses of humor.”
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
Ibáñez has created a multitude of characters, although all of them have inevitably been overshadowed by the hilarious Mortadelo and Filemón. TIA agents have starred in thousands and thousands of cartoons by the Catalan creator. In fact, since the 1990s he has dedicated himself almost exclusively to these two characters, who have even made the leap to the big screen.
But detectives did not always work with Superintendent Vicente. During their early years, they starred in short stories, more of a sketch, where Mortadelo’s costumes and misunderstandings with their boss were the protagonists, who with his two hairs on his head was six feet tall compared to the two meters of the bald investigator.
Nor was the man they called ‘Mortadelo el Melenudo’ always bald. But he tried an ointment from a scientist that, instead of strengthening and shining, caused a sudden alopecia. The inventor was Professor Bacterio, another character that Francisco Ibáñez introduced in the first great album by Mortadelo y Filemón, ‘El sulphate atomic’, a long adventure that meant the leap to the large format of the two Aeroterráquea Research Technicians (TIA).
Apart from this duo of titans, who in their history have even participated in the Olympic Games or in more than one Soccer World Cup, Ibáñez’s inventiveness has left characters such as the blind Rompetechos or the mischievous Botones Sacarino, without forgetting the great saga of 13 Rue del Percebe, which instead of the classic cartoons showed the houses of a building without the wall facing the comic reader (and with a defaulter in the attic that referred to the cartoonist Vázquez).
In the names of his series, Ibáñez used to use rhymes such as ‘Mortadelo and Filemón, information agency’, ‘La Familia Trapisonda, a little group that is the world’ or ‘Pepe Gotera and Otilio, botch jobs at home’, with the most similar to Gargantua. But another characteristic of his comics were the comments of secondary or specific characters, sometimes even surreal. And those urban walls or curbs, often full of details or bugs.
Ibáñez was born in Barcelona four months before the civil war broke out. He grew up in a lower-middle-class family and from a very young age he developed a fondness for comics and American comedy films.
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