Carpanta just turned 75 years old. Zipi and Zape will reach this same respectable age next year. They are iconic characters from our cartoon and, in the case of Carpanta, he is also the person who best embodied post-war hunger in Spain. The creator of it was Josep Escobar, who died in 1994, one of the most important comic authors in the country and with the greatest influence among his contemporaries. He worked for magazines such as Pulgarcito, DDT or Tío Vivo in the historic Bruguera publishing house. However, and despite this relevance, it is difficult for a museum or a public institution to organize a large exhibition on these characters where the originals of these comics can be seen. The reason? The vast majority of the original pages were never returned to their authors or their heirs.
"We only know that they are in a warehouse between Manresa and Vic. But we don't know how many there are or in what conditions they are kept," explains Sergi Escobar, one of the grandchildren of the creator of Carpanta. Escobar receives La Vanguardia at his home in Barcelona and puts on the table the few originals that the heirs have been able to keep from his grandfather's lifetime of work. A small part of the thousands and thousands of pages that Josep Escobar wrote and drew for Bruguera since he joined Tom Thumb in 1947, to relaunch the magazine after the Civil War. Among what he has been able to rescue there are comic strips by Zipe and Zape, by Carpanta and by Petra, a naive maid who is among the cartoonist's most remembered creations. They reached the family at the end of the 1980s, thanks to the initiative of some people in charge of the old Bruguera archive, who handed them over to her grandmother, Josep Escobar's widow, who had already begun to claim them back then.
Historically little value was placed on comic originals and it was assumed almost inevitable that publishers would keep them or even destroy them. With which it is possible to wonder if for Josep Escobar they were important. His grandson has no doubts: "In the last contract he signed [already with Ediciones B] he wanted to explicitly state that the originals were his property, which shows that he was very aware of this matter." Likewise, he remembers that his grandfather was patiently compiling, in envelopes and notebooks, everything he published. “If he kept this reproduced material –he adds–, it is clear to me that it had a great value for him, not so much financial as sentimental. Although at the time, the most important thing was not the originals but to publish them in magazines and that these had the maximum diffusion”.
Today, on the other hand, these originals have a first-class historical, patrimonial and sentimental importance since they explain a part of our social and cultural history. Social because between the 1940s and 1960s, comics –which were then called comics– were one of the main means of entertainment for the population. Cultural because those artists who worked to feed a large entertainment industry without recognition of their copyright knew how to create works of great plastic and narrative value, increasingly appreciated by collectors, historians and cultural institutions.
The comic historian Antoni Guiral, one of the greatest experts on Bruguera's comics, assures that “this collection is of incalculable value”. In his opinion, “the originals belong to his heirs, without a doubt, but they also belong to all of us for their cultural and sentimental value. They should be in the hands of families or a public institution. What cannot be is that they are locked up. I don't know what we would say if we knew that there are some paintings by Miró in a warehouse and that neither the family nor anyone else has access to them”.
That fund of originals from the historic Bruguera publishing house goes far beyond Escobar. There are pages of characters such as Mortadelo and Filemón, Anacleto, El Capitán Trueno, Doña Urraca, Tribulete the reporter or Sir Tim O'Theo. In the case of Josep Escobar's work, his grandson got them to send her a scan "of all the pages that they have kidnapped." “In theory, it is the entire Escobar collection –he remarks–, and there are more than 5,500 pages of Zipi and Zape alone. There are also Carpanta, Petra, Aniceto, Don Óptimo, Plim and Toby, but very few of these”.
Both the Ministry of Culture of the Generalitat and the Library of Catalonia have been interested in knowing the status of the claim of the originals of the cartoonists of Bruguera. A very important patrimonial fund that families claim. The heirs of cartoonists such as Manuel Vázquez, Conti, Cifré, Jorge or Raf, in addition to the Escobar family, demand that the originals of their parents or grandparents be returned. "The request is not new, the novelty is that now these families are in contact and we are united to make this collective claim to Prensa Ibérica", explains Sergi Escobar.
Another novelty in this artistic-editorial soap opera is that the latest change of ownership has caused an unprecedented situation: for the first time, the company that has the rights to exploit the work and that republishes these comics in accordance with their heirs (Penguin Random House ) is not the same as the originals (Prensa Ibérica). In other words: whoever has the originals cannot commercially exploit them. This scenario adds even more questions – “Why so much interest in preserving these originals that do not contribute anything to them”, asks Sergi Escobar – but perhaps the new situation allows us to imagine a first ray of hope to solve the case.
As you could read in the old adventure comics: "To be continued".
