He was the last survivor of the first generation of the Bruguera school, that of the Cifré, Escobar, Conti and Peñarroya, true totems of postwar comics. Authors who in 1957 stood up to the historic publisher by promoting a solo project, an independent label called DER that published the comic weekly Tío Vivo.
It did not have the success of Pulgarcito or the renown of TBO, but the quality of its content –beginning with its attractive covers, with an overwhelming graphic modernity– and the story of its birth outside of the big industry made this magazine one of the the most emblematic of our cartoon. Enrich was the youngest of those authors who decided to leave the powerful Bruguera and work with contracts that finally recognized their copyrights.
Enric de Manuel González, his real name, was born in 1929 in Vénissieux, a city in the commune of Lyon, and joined Bruguera as a cartoonist in the advertising department. In Tío Vivo he resumed the cartoonist facet that he had practiced in magazines like Alex. In 1958, he was appointed artistic director of the weekly, replacing Conti, and remained in the position for two years, until Bruguera absorbed the magazine and the cartoonists returned to the parent company, putting an end to an editorial adventure that Paco Roca described in El cartoonist winter.
His drawing style was like his humor: simple, kind, clean and expressive. The characters also responded to the same pattern. Proof of this is his best-known creature, El caco Bonifacio, a thief dressed in a mask, jacket and patched pants, who turned out to be a good-natured and even candid guy, capable of robbing himself because he was on the wrong floor. Bonifacio was born in 1957 as a graphic joke on the back cover of Tío Vivo and later went on to star in one-page comics. In 2009 some of these adventures, dated between 1958 and 1965, were compiled in a volume edited by RBA under the direction of critic Antoni Guiral.
In 1962, after the death of Cifré, who was his brother-in-law, Enrich continued the series El repórter Tribulete, although he was never able to sign it due to editorial imperative. In Bruguera he created other characters such as El Doctor Perejil or what was another of his most lasting creations, Montse la amiga de los animales (1978), initially conceived for the women's magazine G and which later ended up in other headers such as Esther or Zipi and Zape . Montse is a cunning blonde girl with braids and round glasses, with a clear environmental sensibility, which often causes some setbacks at home, especially with her father. For the magazine Lecturas, she created a series of humorous strips entitled El matrimonio Pirúlez (1974).
In the 1960s and 1970s, he published comic strips and jokes with spicy humor distributed mainly in the British market through the Bardon Art agency. A selection of these works were compiled in 2011 in the two anthological volumes entitled Sexy Humor (Amaníaco Ediciones). Enrich passed away in Barcelona on Sunday, February 12, at the age of 93.
