Laughter
common in Franco's Spain
"Mankind has only one really effective weapon: laughter. At the moment there is the laughter, all our hard crashes, all our irritations and resentments fade and our spirit 'sunny' takes place. "
Mark Twain
humor and power tend not to get along, especially when the power is not smart, but it is the power of force and weapons. This power has no humor. Humor has always represented a state of rebellion and resistance against the status quo , a shrewd eye to whip up consciences, a protest hidden behind a smile.
Enric Sio said that the history of postwar Spain was reflected, week by week in the pages of Tom Thumb and the post-war comic is a magnificent document of the miseries of Franco's Spain who managed to circumvent the censorship itself.
The Franco dictatorship was also a difficult period for the comic English. ow ever, after the political propaganda comics, comic Cifré young then, Conti, Escobar and Nadal, to name a few, laid the foundations of a cartoon that mocks mocking, it was a real social portrait of the era, a portrait of reality that they saw around them.
On that dreary and depressing reality, at least for most people in those years, there was another alternative reality and comforting, a place where life was more just, secure and, ultimately, happy: The Comic Book of Humor .
The comic book to film was the supreme art of dreams, were black, gray or white , optimistic or pessimistic, naturalistic or fantastic. can not wonder, then, that the type of story that most captivated the crowds outside that has helped them escape from everyday life, or at least to interpret it with a more seductive than the simple reality. In the forties and late fifties of last century, when the cartoon art blossomed in our country.
Cartoon achieved undisputed position in the popular culture of those years. Perhaps that is why has been neglected, as unworthy of serious debate . While its main constituent elements (design, drawing, cartooning and writing, among others) have received academic treatment separately, the combination of all of them found a small place in literary and artistic in spite of being recognized on the world as art in our country, understandably, occupies a place that does not match that should occupy.
Who does not remember names like DDT , Carousel Can or Can? Pages and pages full of characters who are already part of our cultural history and the country.
publications were children but older children. Time has made it clear that it was not a simple entertainment for children, but what now? Commercial and cultural grounds, all those characters no longer exist. Democracy brought their own characters, very different from previous ones, but the new ones have not been able to replace them.
Today, the comic book industry is totally different from that time. No longer are the style magazines mentioned above, short stories of various characters. The native comic is not having a good time. Our artists have been adapted to the aesthetic Yankee or the manga to survive. However, the decline of our story began when Vertex imported and massively, the comic book superhero.
How far is the heyday of our story, during the fifties and sixties, when the English publisher of comics production runs reached hundreds of thousands of copies. And if we add that it was estimated that each comic book was read by more than ten different people, we can get an idea of \u200b\u200bthe importance that this medium had on the English Society
Manuel López
