The first black heroine to star in a popular newspaper strip widely distributed in North American newspapers was called Friday Foster. She lived in Harlem, was an assistant to a fashion photographer and sometimes worked as a model. Independent and adventurous, she broke many of the racial and gender stereotypes of the time and in just four years, between 1970 and 1974, she became a powerful icon of black power. So far, everything is more or less normal. The truly extraordinary thing about the story is that it was drawn in a house in Guinardó by a Barcelonan, Jordi Longaron, who traveled to New York only once, never setting foot in Harlem (he toured the neighborhood in a taxi, from which took photographs) and ended up abandoning the project, of which a film was even made, defeated by its own success.
From the Los Angeles Times to the New York Daily News or the Chicago Tribune, Friday Foster appeared as a daily black and white strip in many American newspapers (the total circulation exceeded 50 million copies) and on Sundays they were grouped together on one page in full color inside a booklet. “Life became for him a race against time, hell,” remembers his son Marc Longaron. Every Friday, the cartoonist would rush out to the post office in Plaza Antonio López, from where he would send the originals that would see the light of day three weeks later. Sometimes they did not arrive on time and the editors had to resort as an emergency solution to cartoonists like Frank Springer to make the strips imitating the Longaron style. “It was a titanic effort. He worked every day of the week, endless days of 15, 16, 17 hours... until he realized that he had become a slave and said goodbye," says his son before the originals that now hang in the MNAC. within the Longaron and Friday Foster exhibition. The unexpected heroine.
Jordi Longaron (Barcelona, 1933-2019), who was also a painter and illustrator, had begun drawing at the age of fourteen in Toray, the publishing house of Agañas belicas, despite the fact that he suffered from essential tremor in his hands from birth. “They never stopped him still. See if he was a beast who escaped serving in the military because if he shot he would kill the colonel," Marc jokes. "But the difficulty of not being able to make a fine drawing with a pen like that of Boixcar [the author of the old comics, with whom He started as an assistant] made his strength, which consisted of applying ink with a brush, which he handled with extreme skill. There were even illustrators who tried to imitate his lines by shaking their hands on the paper!”
In the gray Barcelona of the 1950s, Longaron learned English so he could read the American magazines that came to him. And there his work experienced a Copernican turn. He discovered that those cartoonists he admired worked from photographs, with actors and models representing different scenes, as if it were a photo novel, and he began to implement the method. “At that time he had left the war genre and started working with westerns. With the Toray cartoonists, on Sundays they dressed up as cowboys, rented horses and went to take photographs in Esplugas City, the town that Balcázar Studios had built to film spaghetti westerns.
"He begins to make a drawing that no longer has anything to do with the one that was made here in Spain, which is even better than that of the Americans, and on top of that much cheaper, and that is taken advantage of by the editors of the time, who "They offer the services of Barcelona artists to the European market." Longarón was hired to make short comics based on songs by Elvis Presley or Tommy Steele for British magazines such as Valentine or Roxy, which became enormously popular.
And it is in this context of success that the scriptwriter of the James Bond strip for the British Daily Express, Jim Lawrence, appears in his life, a former brigadier who had fought in the Civil War who lived in New Jersey and who through the agency Bardon Art was looking for a Spanish artist to shape the character of Friday Foster. Longarón traveled to New York in 1969 to sign the contract, meet the screenwriter and take photos of Harlem from the window of a taxi to document the way its inhabitants walk, the traffic signs, the architecture of the neighborhood (which in a slip will incorporate booklet Mallorcan blinds).
To shape the protagonist, he was inspired by a model he had seen in Playboy magazine, sexy and glamorous, reproducing her afro features with a detailed and meticulous line without resorting to shading. “Sometimes he uses my mother as a model and on other occasions he uses my aunt, a painter, a draftsman... He couldn't hire models and used anyone who walked through the door of his house. In the mornings, with good light, she took the photographs. "I developed them at noon, in the afternoon I drew them and at night I inked them," recalls Marc, who has reinvested the 60,000 euros of his inheritance in buying at auctions the originals that are now exhibited at the MNAC (until June 24 ).
The strips were rejected in the southern newspapers where racial segregation persisted and, in their Sunday color version, they were rescued in 2021 by the comic critic Javier Mesón and the cultural journalist David Moreu in a volume edited by Norma. After Longaron's abandonment, Friday Foster survived just a few months in the hands of an American cartoonist, but in 1976, at the height of blaxpoitation, he had a second life in the cinema with Pam Grier (the icon resurrected by Tarantino in Jackie Brown) as protagonist.
