The story of Mortadelo and Filemón has lived, over 67 years and 221 albums, innumerable ups and downs. Although Ibáñez always signed the adventures of the two disastrous spies, in its realization there was everything: apocryphal authorsRights struggles, frightened towards other publishers … and even an unpublished album, which will see the light next October.
Ibáñez Mético. Mythological, even because this album had been heard in forums and between fans, but it was not known if its existence was real or an urban legend. ‘Hachish … Health!’ It presents the Aunt agents facing a network of traffickers. Penguin, current owner of the rights of Bruguera and the characters of Ibáñez, has barely given more details about the comic and the reason why he remained unpublished, but with that title the assumptions are already being shot: Ibáñez had crossed, for the first time, a red line with his agents?
A new collection. ‘Ibáñez Mético’ is the title of the collection that Penguin opens with this album and will release stories of the characters with extras as original pages of the scripts and scanning of the pencil pages. Everything comes with notes from the expert in the comics of the time Jordi Canyissà. What Penguin has not yet made clear is whether in the next numbers of this collection they will discuss and score already published comics or will continue to recover unpublished after the death of Ibáñez, as it has been done here or took the last album of the characters, the posthumous ”Paris 2024‘.
Always the present. As we commented on Our article about ‘I and I’in 1991 Ibáñez recovered the authorship of the characters after the closing of Bruguera. But the characters crossed a strong creative crisis from which they left in 1996, when the author decided to focus his histoprias on current issues, a resource that they would keep until the death of Ibáñez in 2023. Ladies were born as ‘The lord of the bricks’ in 2005, about the brick crisis, ‘For Isis, the crisis arrived!’ In 2009 u ‘Okupas!’ In 2002, about anti-okupation paranoia.
And the hashish. The Legalization of marijuana It was one of the key debates of Spanish society in 2014, the year to which this story belongs, and Ibáñez, faithful to the trend that were following the last adventures of Mortadelo, approached it with its characteristic style. Ibáñez did not feature in these years to get into somewhat more controversial issues that brought the Aunt’s agents closer to social satire: ‘The treasurer’, of 2015, about corruption in the PP, it is a good example, and possibly this ‘hashish … Health!’ Follow the same line.
Ibáñez recovered. Penguin has finally decided to start giving a good cueta of the deep Bruguera catalog he has in his possession. To this first installment of Ibáñez Mético is added the recent ‘The first 200 cases of Mortadelo and Filemon‘, which recover in chronological order the first and unusual adventures of the agents, published between 1958 and 1961, very different from the long adventures that would give them fame later. It is a process that we hope will continue at a good pace, and that it seems that the editorial is cultivating with other legendary characters such as Superlópez or Anacleto.
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