I would like Francisco Ibáñez's funeral to change the dead person as if it were a cartoon from one of his comics. Because if I was convinced that my mother would be immortal, I also thought so of Mortadelo (Filemón always seemed like a cretin to me). And when the father is dead, he also takes all his children.
Ibáñez gave us the right to be children, but reading without sweeteners or nuances, without suffering the fears that Disney gave away. In each adventure Mortadelo gave me his hand so that I would accompany him in search of atomic sulfate or to test Professor Bacterio's inventions with him or to go to the World Cup or the Olympic Games, like the ones in 1976 in Gatolandia, where Mortadelo and Filemón infiltrated as athletes to try to find the spy from Perrolandia who was trying to boycott the Games (I remember one of the moments in which I laughed the most as a child, when Mortadelo rides a fearful horse in the jumping tests in the equestrian).
Perhaps because Mortadelo and my older brother were born in the same year (1958) I always gave him the new adventure that Francisco Ibáñez drew and scripted. A fortnight ago, when he turned 65, I wrapped up the latest edit for him, Basketball World Cup 2023, where the two TIA agents have to discover who shrinks the basketball players who will participate in the championship.
The bald man with glasses has been our pathetic favorite spy in a Spain full of real Mortadelos and where reality competes with Ibáñez's heroes in comics like The Treasurer. Synopsis: someone has emptied the safe of the Papillary Party (literally) and our agents must discover the thug. They say that it is the best-selling book in a single day in Spain (10,000 copies), surely because reality is so beast that no one believes it.
With the death of Ibáñez, our childhood collapsed and they definitely ripped the wallpaper from our room from when we were children. And in the same way that after watching Titanic so much I always think that, in the next viewing, Leonardo DiCaprio will not drown, I hope to wake up tomorrow and discover that Mortadelo does not die in the last cartoon, he is faking it.
