Tribute to Francisco Ibáñez at the Gabriel García Márquez Library

On Wednesday 4 October at 6 p.m., at the Gabriel García Márquez Library (Plaça de Carmen Balcells, 1), the ceremony will be held to award the Barcelona Gold Medal for Cultural Merit, posthumously, to the artist Francisco Ibáñez. The event will be attended by his widow, Remedios Solera Sánchez, his daughter, Núria Ibáñez Solera, as well as other family members. The Mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, will present them with the medal, in a ceremony led by the actor Carlos Areces, in which different friends of the honoree will take the floor to give a speech. The event can be followed on the Barcelona Cultura website.

The decision to award the city’s highest distinction in the cultural sphere to Francisco Ibáñez was taken in a plenary session in February last year. For reasons of the artist’s health, the award ceremony was suspended on several occasions, until, unfortunately, it had to be organised posthumously. The venue chosen for the tribute has a special significance. The Gabriel García Márquez Library has a collection dedicated to the work of Ibáñez, who was a neighbour of the neighbourhood and attended the inauguration of the facility.

Francisco Ibáñez (Barcelona, 1936-2023) began to develop a great love of comics and drawing at a very young age. His first publication of a drawing came when he was only eleven years old, in the magazine Chicos, although he studied accountancy and commercial accounting and his first job was linked to the world of banking. He soon began to combine it with his collaborations in magazines such as Nicolás, Chicolino, Picolín, Liliput and La Risa, with strips, sketches, humorous serials, creating his own characters or continuing the creations of other authors.

In 1957 he decided to devote himself full-time to creating stories and left his job at the bank. That same year he began to collaborate with the publishing house Bruguera. In 1958 he published the first series of Mortadelo y Filemón in the magazine Pulgarcito, his most iconic characters. Between 1957 and 1963 he began a period in which he would go on to establish his own style within Bruguera, creating an infinite number of characters and adapting some of his best series for the publisher’s different magazines and comics: La familia Trapisonda (Pulgarcito, 1958); 13, Rue del Percebe (Tío Vivo, 1961); El botones Sacarino (El DDT, 1963); Rompetechos (Tío Vivo, 1964) or Pepe Gotera y Otilio (Tío Vivo, 1966). Throughout his long career, Ibáñez accumulated more than 100 million sold albums and earned the esteem of several generations of schoolchildren, who consider him a master, and of legions of admirers of all ages.