* The author is part of the community of readers of La Vanguardia
Although the appearance of the first TBO was at the beginning of the 20th century, the true explosion of comics began in 1940, when cartoonists began to make weekly comics with drawings for children.
Its main production publishing houses were located in Barcelona, Valencia and Madrid, in this order of importance.
In principle, comic books were called comics, a name that was later adopted by the Bruguera publishing house for one of its copies given the impact that the copy published by the publisher weekly had with several stories of imaginary characters.
In its time, TBO achieved the largest number of regular readers known: The Ulysses Family, The Gilda Sisters, Carpanta and a series of characters that soon made an impression on readers.
The popularity of said newspaper was such that it caused the Royal Academy of Language to include the word "TBO" in the 1968 edition of the dictionary, as a valid word in the dictionary to nominate all editions of notebooks with stories of children's drawings.
It depresses me that we want to be pioneers of many things, that we protest everything and that both people and publishing companies have forgotten our origins and let ourselves be invaded by the word "comic", when the beginning was the TBO.
The first news we have of the world of comics dates back to December 1903, when Aureli Capmany and Josep Aladern published a project for the first 4-page magazine, inviting readers to subscribe to a children's magazine whose appearance It would take place at the beginning of January 1904 and would be called En Patufet. It would be written in Catalan, sponsored by the Foment Autonomista Català, to disseminate an ideology aimed at youth.
The magazine was presented as being edited for the service of boys and girls and the special issue explained what the weekly would consist of and the goals that the magazine's management pursued with its publication. It was especially a tool for learning the Catalan language whose profits would be used to maintain free schools. He ended the four pages by commenting on the content.
The first official En Patufet magazine appeared on January 3, 1904. Its acceptance by the society of that time was instantaneous, which meant that, within a year of its publication, the magazine was acquired by the editor Baguñà, who commissioned Josep Morató to direct it and later J. M. Folch i Torres.
In Madrid, on December 10, 1904, the magazine Monos appeared, a humorous weekly that featured the first graphic novel published in Spain and which recounted the adventures of Baby.
Subsequently, we had to wait until December 12, 1915 for the Espoy publishing house to publish the first issue of what was the first Spanish comic strip Dominguín.
With the arrival in the seventies of foreign publications and to show off their personality, the word comic was losing strength, although for older people they continued to call it by the name "TBO." Later generations changed the name of the product to comic, an Anglo-Saxon word for comic book drawings.
Nowadays, when there are stores dedicated exclusively to such publications, they would not understand if someone came into their store using the word "comic" instead of asking for a comic.
For many children of that time, reading a comic before bed was a sacred ritual. It was a moment of tranquility and enjoyment, in which I could escape reality by letting my imagination fly.
The comics with their different themes offered a great variety of stories for all tastes. There was adventure, humor, mystery, science fiction, fantasy... Every child could find something they liked.
