Green-red, green-red. Thus, 2,160 times a day. Every 40 seconds, the pedestrian traffic light located at the corner of Carrer Concili de Trento amb Treball, in the Sant Martí neighborhood of Barcelona, alternately shows a Mortadel·lo in green and a Filemó in red.
unmistakable
The first, with his peculiar ways of walking with his arms in the air. In the second – he had to be stopped, naturally – his ears and attitude betray him. They are the two comic book characters created by the cartoonist Francisco Ibáñez, who died on July 15 of this year, who for the first time have mutated in led, in a nice tribute to one of the great creators of comics.
The traffic light is in front of the brand new Gabriel García Márquez public library and it was chosen precisely for this reason: it has an important fund dedicated to the artist, who was also a resident of the area.
The inauguration of the traffic light was simple. The mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, with Ibáñez's widow, Remedios Solera, and his daughter Núria, dropped a cloth covering the light signal. It was 11:08 a.m. The first to appear was Filemó, despite the fact that the street was blocked.
The Navarre professor who had the idea, and whose name is just the same as the cartoonist, Francisco Ibáñez, also attended the nice ceremony. He launched it on social networks in August, a few days after the master died, and in a few hours it went viral. It reached 350,000 retweets.
The administration was unusually agile, and in just two months it has coordinated the family, the publisher that publishes Ibáñez (Penguin Random House), the General Directorate of Traffic (to approve the signals) and the traffic light manufacturers. The event brought together dozens of neighborhood residents, curious and delighted by the initiative.
Núria Ibáñez jokingly said in a short speech that, for the day to have been complete, all that would have been missing... was that the traffic light had fallen on the head of some passerby and that it would have ended with "a nyanyo". That would have been pure Ibáñez.
"The pedestrian will not mind having to wait if it is Filemó who calls him to stop", laughed the teacher who had the idea. Collboni celebrated that the idea soon became a popular clamor and that, with such speed, "such a special and long-awaited day" had arrived for all Ibáñez fans.
A few meters away, inside the library, dozens of dwarfs were reading Ibáñez's comics on the second floor. But not only Ibáñez. Every corner of the new equipment – floor, under the stairs, the terrace – was full to overflowing. Few free places. It is noticeable that it already has five awards, such as the best public library in the world this year and the FAD for architecture.
Before the end of the year, three more pairs of Mortadel·lo and Filemó will be distributed in different crossroads of Barcelona. One will be in Comte Urgell and Manso streets, where the Sant Antoni Sunday market is held, a mecca for thousands of fans of literature in general and comics in particular for decades; another, on Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes with Bac de Roda, near where the Ibáñez family lives, and the last one, at possibly the busiest intersection in the city, between Ronda de Sant Pere and Passeig de Gràcia .
