It would be the year 1979 in Valencia, perhaps already 80. I don’t remember well… I was barely 10 years old and I gave the first interview of my life to the magazine of my Falla after winning the prestigious drawing contest in my neighborhood. “Someday,” I told them, “I will be like ibanez“. Ok, he was an arrogant brat, but he was really convinced of what he was saying. I was going to be as good and as famous as him. I copied his style, his drawings, his comics and even his signature. If he drew an F. huge next to Ibáñez, I drew an F. equally big next to Roca. We are Francisco Ibáñez and Francisco Roca. Like Mortadello and Philemon. Like Pepe Drip and Otilio. I was a kind of Ibáñez white label hidden in a kid with perhaps too high expectations. So tall that I even sent an envelope with my best drawings to the Bruguera publishing house in case they had a vacancy for a child who couldn’t raise an inch from the ground. The drawings were infamous, no one ever answered me, but I was already very clear about what I wanted to dedicate myself to.
All those early copycats disappeared one day, but I kept drawing. Already with my style, with my stories and even with my signature. It was already Paco and not Francisco, but the Ibáñez reference was still present in some lost corner. I belong, like millions of Spaniards, to one of the many generations that discovered comics and even reading through Bruguera’s comic strips and particularly Ibáñez’s cartoons.
If I am a comic artist, it is largely thanks to him. Today I know that he not only influenced me. I don’t know if there is another author worldwide who has had so many readers for more than 60 years, who has hooked so many different generations to his comics, at so many different stages and going through so many Spain. We were all neighbors 13, Rue du Barnacle, that kind of rear window through which we could observe an entire country. Decade after decade, Ibáñez was able to bring millions of readers to his pages, to his usual characters and his jokes and his words lifelong. And he achieved it without ever ceasing to be the worker of that post-war era and misery that his first drawings portrayed so well, and without ceasing to be the amusing author who invented Mortadelo, Rompetechos o al Saccharine Buttons as if he were himself Profesor Bacterio.
Ibáñez was always a friendly, jovial and smiling guy. Eternally grateful to his fans for whom he always had a joke and a doodle. He taught us that you could make a living from comics and, furthermore, that you could enjoy recognition while you were alive.. No one how he celebrated his success without dropping the pencil until the last day. Ibanez was a best seller, the person who has sold the most comics in Spain, the author of characters that today are part of popular culture in our country. Mortadelo and Filemón are at the level of Don Quixote or La Celestina.
A few years ago, many drawings, some comics and a few interviews later, my mother gave me a blue cardboard folder. She had kept it for years, it belonged to her private collection, but she thought that I should keep it. Inside were my first drawings. And there were my Bruguera-style cartoons, all signed with a gigantic F., like F. Ibáñez’s.