Antonio ‘Forges’ Fraguas: Popular cartoonist who best represented the past half century of Spanish history

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Antonio Fraguas de Pablo, known as Forges, was the cartoonist whose charming, reflective drawings, published under the pen name Forges earned him immense popularity in his native Spain.

Forges, who has died aged 76, rose to prominence in the 1970s, when his newspaper vignettes in the waning years, and early aftermath, of Francisco Franco’s regime helped a nation bruised by decades of authoritarian rule see its ills through a comedic lens.

That was no easy task: Spain was still bitterly divided in those years, and the threat of censorship, or opprobrium, was high. But Forges found a tone – at once biting and compassionate – that allowed him to address even the most taboo of subjects while generating only limited backlash.

In 1976, just months after Franco’s death, appeared the first tome of Forges’s Los Forrenta Anos, a comic book series in which he set out to address close to 40 years of Francoist rule, including its most tragic aspects, in a frank yet funny way. In 1979, he received the freedom of expression prize from Spain’s union of journalists in recognition of these efforts.

Though little known abroad, he became a fixture of Spanish public life, consistently wielding that same free spirit over the years to poke fun at his country’s politics and daily life. Upon the passing of its chief cartoonist, the country’s best-selling general interest newspaper El Pais called Forges “the caricaturist who best represented the past half century of Spanish history”.

Antonio Fraguas de Pablo was born in Madrid in 1942, the second of nine children of a Catalan mother, the homemaker Maria Ascension de Pablo Lopez, and a Galician father, the novelist, screenwriter and one-time high-ranking Francoist public servant Antonio Fraguas Saavedra.

Forges began work at 14, taking up a job as a technician at the newly launched state-owned television broadcaster. In that role he was once charged with repairing Franco’s own TV set, and met the general in person. From that glimpse into Franco’s life he retained “one very strange thing”: in the dictator’s home, there were no books.

He himself nurtured more literary ambitions. Forges, who had drawn from a young age, at first on toilet paper, told his father that he wished to make cartoons for a living. Fraguas Saavedra gave him his blessing, on one condition: that his work be unique.

He took on the pen name Forges, the Catalan translation of Fraguas, “You forge”. In 1964 a newspaper published one of his cartoons for the first time; in 1973 he decided to dedicate himself exclusively to cartooning. His popularity quickly grew, as the public came to love his cast of characters – stone-faced bureaucrats, overbearing bosses, provincial old ladies dressed all in black – and delighted in his daring caricatures of the political class.

In one typical cartoon, Forges depicted a small man in a large marital bed, staring straight ahead as his wife says, “I’m not asking for the impossible… Just imagine I am the people…” Readers recognised in this character a Francoist whose public displays of power far exceeded, they liked to think, his abilities in private.

Such cartoons were subversive, and Forges faced trial several times. But he always managed to bypass censorship because his jokes, though teasing, were not quite explicit enough to be prosecuted. “Most of the times you really couldn’t explain his jokes,” his son, the journalist Antonio Fraguas, told The Independent. “You only could laugh about them.”

In his first cartoon after Franco’s death, Forges depicted a man introducing a concerned-looking older woman to a smiling, younger one with the words, “Here is my wife… Here is a new era”.

As he chronicled Spain’s transition to democracy in the years that followed, Forges prompted laughter among both those nostalgic for Franco and those eager for change. Tender yet critical, absurd yet relatable, his comedy addressed some of the most polarising issues of the day, without however alienating its readers.

Still, he did know how to kick up a fuss. In 1995 he wrote a letter to the entire staff of the widely read daily El Mundo to announce his departure from the paper, which he had helped launch six years prior, because he could no longer countenance what he saw as its growing bias in favour of the conservative politician Jose Maria Aznar. He moved to rival publication El Pais, where he is said to have received a handsome pay rise.

His cartoons did also, at times, provoke controversy, as when he implied a likeness between Spain’s high value added tax on cultural products and the destruction of cultural heritage by terrorist groups, or, late last year, when he depicted a Catalan secessionist being poked in the eye by his own flag.

Fancying himself a descendant of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra – who shared a surname with Forges’s father – the cartoonist found endless inspiration in the adventures of that novelist’s celebrated character, Don Quixote. As he developed his vignettes, Forges would often ask himself: “How would Miguel, my grandfather of three hundred years, have resolved this situation?”

An early newspaper article about the generation of cartoonists that emerged alongside Forges noted this propensity, calling him “the most literary of them all”. He wanted to make his readers think as much as laugh.

Among his favourite themes were Spanish history, bureaucracy, bullfighting, new technology, and autocracy in all its forms. His fat-nosed, awkward-bodied characters – drawn without flourish using a thick, black marker – are instantly recognisable to three generations of Spaniards.

He was ubiquitous in popular Spanish culture not just through his estimated 250,000 published cartoons but also through two films which he directed in the 1970s, multiple television programmes and comic books, a novel, and his frequent broadcast appearances as a guest.

In one such appearance, on a late-night talk show in 2016, a soon-to-be-ill Forges addressed the subject of death. The cartoonist, who by then had taken on the public persona of a kindly elder, wearing a scrappy white beard around a perpetually cheeky smile, said: “Everybody dies. If you are going to take that badly, you’re doing it wrong. So you have to take it as a joke.” To him, life was a comic strip, and so was death.

Fraguas is survived by his wife of 51 years, the author Pilar Garrido Cendoya, as well as by their four children and five grandchildren.

Forges always maintained that compassion was the foundation of his work. Highlighting this approach in the afterword of Los Forrenta Anos, he thanked those of his readers who knew how to put their sense of humour before their political ideas, because, he wrote, “the day that we Spaniards will be able to laugh at ourselves, we will all be brothers”.

Forges, (Antonio Fraguas de Pablo) Spanish cartoonist, born 17 January 1942, died 22 February 2018