Tributes have poured in for the Spanish cartoonist Francisco Ibáñez Talavera, creator of the much-loved strip Mortadelo and Filemón, who died on Saturday aged 87.
Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister, tweeted: “You made life much more fun for generations. We’ll miss you.”
“Ibáñez is hugely important in Spanish popular culture,” said Jordi Canyissà, author of Ibáñez, Master Cartoonist. “His comics are as popular in Spain as Astérix in France or Tintin in Belgium. Generations have learnt to read from his stories and laughed over his comic strips.
“He defined an epoch with a type of absurd humour, everything exaggerated and full of mistakes and comic violence. His drawing style is versatile and extremely dynamic.
“In the 1950s, comics were a massively popular form of entertainment, as big as TV and video games are now. There’s no doubt that Ibáñez was Spain’s bestselling author. He worked tirelessly for this great humour factory that comics were and right up to his death was working on a new Mortadelo and Filemón adventure.”
Ibáñez was born in Barcelona in 1936, four months before the outbreak of the civil war. He fell in love with comics at an early age and published his first cartoon at the age of 11.
In 1957, against his parents’ advice, he quit his job in a bank to work full time as a cartoonist, working for Bruguera, a publisher that spawned an entire school of cartoonists. In 1958 he created his most famous and best loved characters, Mortadelo and Filemón, a pair of hapless secret agents.
Originally conceived as a parody of Sherlock Holmes, he decided instead to make it a spoof of the spy series then popular on TV. The first stories were only a few pages long but then developed into volumes of over 40 pages, whose publication was eagerly awaited by generations of Spanish children.
The gags and slapstick humour derived from the personalities of the two characters, Filemón, the grumpy boss, and Mortadelo, his feckless and accident-prone assistant, but who could adopt any disguise at his boss’s behest.
Although best known for Mortadelo and Filemón, Ibáñez created other successful series, notably 13 Rue de Percebe (a percebe is a goose barnacle), a depiction of the life of working and lower middle-class families, and Rompetechos about a clumsy, half-blind Spaniard who doesn’t understand anything and is always angry.
Over the course of his life, Ibáñez sold more than 30m comics. When the film La Gran Aventura de Mortadelo y Filemón was released in 2003 it became one of Spanish cinema’s biggest box-office successes.
“It’s difficult to summarise his importance, as he is a fundamental part of my personal and collective memory,” says Gabino Carballo, a landscape architect. “I grew up in the 70s and 80s in a provincial town, sad, like Francoism. Mortadelo and Filemón were this little ray of surreal and good-natured cheer that is characteristic of Spanish humour.”
“His stories are like a detailed portrait of Francoist society and postwar Spain,” says Barcelona documentary film-maker Carles Brugueras. “In particular the small misfortunes, schemes, the tyrannical boss, badly paid work, every kind of swindle, full of soft, clownish violence and in sometimes old-fashioned Spanish but always in the context of childish humour. It was a fundamental part of my childhood.”
“Ibáñez gave us the right to be children,” commented TV presenter Jordi Basté. “With his death, childhood is over. But just as every time I watch Titanic I think Leonardo DiCaprio won’t drown, I hope to wake up tomorrow to discover that Mortadelo doesn’t die in the last strip, he’s only pretending.”
