'Paris 2024' is the title of the final work of the lamented cartoon genius Francisco Ibáñez. It is the last and unfinished adventure of Mortadelo and Filemón, and it is already in bookstores. There are twenty unpublished pages with a typewritten script and uncolored pencil drawings that open the doors to the laboratory of the comic genius. It is published posthumously on the Bruguera label and with a prologue by Arturo Pérez Reverte. “We had never had the privilege of peering into the artist's workshop, until now,” celebrates the writer and academic.
This unfinished album for history corresponds to number 222 of the Magos del Humor collection. In their latest adventure, the harried agents of the TIA – Aeroterráquea Investigation Technicians -, the most famous characters in Spanish comics, must solve a mystery that puts the most important sporting event in the world at risk and save the athletes.
The Super sends them to the French capital to protect the Olympians from possible drone attacks. As always, they end up in trouble and beaten up. “Touristes a la guillotine!”, “Touristes hors fue long!”, reads the banner of a vignette in the purest Ibáñez style, with sticks, bricks and wrenches to mortify the tourists.
Typewritten page and script from Ibáñez's last album.
Bruguera Editorial
The masterful illustrator and screenwriter who died last July, aged 87 and with his boots on, worked on the album until the last day. The twenty pages with the script typed in his old Olivetti and the vignettes drawn in pencil reveal his meticulous work full of dynamism and talent.
Under normal circumstances, the album would be 44 pages. He stops at number 20, which was left in the middle forever. “If I had lived one more day, it would be finished,” explained Nuria Ibáñez, the cartoonist's daughter, to the RAC1 radio station. She had previously confirmed that the possibility of resuming the Mortadelo and Filemón series with other authors, as happened with Asterix and Obelix, is not being considered. Yes, the vast work of his father will be republished, which will surely find new and grateful readers. With the same pages and hardcover format as those of the Magos del Humor collection, the album follows the trail of publication of unfinished works by the great Franco-Belgian author Hergé, such as 'Tintin and Alpha-Art'.
Infiltrators
“With 'Paris 2024' we infiltrate almost stealthily into the study of the great Ibáñez, into the backroom of his endearing world,” writes Arturo Pérez-Reverte, for whom Ibáñez's career made the cartoonist a good candidate for the Cervantes Prize. Not in vain, in his prologue Pérez-Reverte defends the literary value of Ibáñez's work and places it in the tradition of the picaresque novel.
The posthumous album “collects Ibáñez's latest ideas and sketches. It is the book he was working on when death overtook him and it is an unfinished album. Without a doubt, he is the most emotional Magos del Humor, which puts an end to his very long career,” says Gemma Xiol, editorial director of Bruguera.
Ibáñez work board. A vignette and the cover of album 222 of the Magos del Humor series
María Pujol / Bruguera Editorial
“It is already living history of comics, because never before have we had such a privileged perspective of Ibáñez's work process, which makes reading it a unique and intimate experience,” adds Xiol. He specifies that Ibáñez “never” showed his editors “a work that was not already finished, that was definitive”, so that in this album “we can see some vignettes that are still in process and that is something unique.”
Prolific
Born in Barcelona on March 15, 1936, Francisco Ibáñez is the most recognized Spanish cartoonist nationally and internationally. The first comic strip of Mortadelo and Filemón appeared in issue 1,394 of Pulgarcito magazine, on January 20, 1958, in the same Bruguera publishing house that now publishes the last of the longest-running series of Spanish comics.
It was the germ of other great series and characters that, in addition to Mortadelo and Filemón Ibáñez, he extracted from his tireless and inexhaustible magic, such as the deranged Trapisonda family, the neighbors of 13, Rue del Percebe, the outrageous buttons Sacarino, the blind Rompetechos and the inflatables Pepe Gotera and Otilio and their home delivery botches.
Nuria Ibáñez, daughter of the ibujante.
Maria Pujol
With some 20,000 pages produced over more than 65 years of activity, Ibáñez was the most prolific cartoonist of a brilliant generation of cartoonists. He made his comics by hand, as at the beginning of his career, armed only with a pencil, paper and an eraser that he barely used. He outlined each vignette with soft pencil lines. Later he stated it with a stronger and more marked line that is the one that appears in 'Paris 2024', before the color inking that was done in the editorial. He never wanted to change his Olivetti for the computer that his family gave him and he published an album titled 'The computer, what a horror!'.
#Olympic #mission #Mortadelo #Filemón
