Forges (cartoonist)

Gat Perich International Humor Award Creu de Sant Jordi Gold Medal of Merit in Labour
Website	www.forges.com

Antonio Fraguas de Pablo, better known as Forges (17 January 1942 – 22 February 2018),

of the word fraguas.

Biography

Born in

, Lecturas, etc.

Since 1982 he published the editorial joke in Diario 16 and later in El Mundo, but he left this newspaper after having been one of its seven founders, and in 1995 he went on to sign El País's editorial joke.

In 1992 his novel Doce de Babilonia appears. Forges reveals himself as a fairly solid and orderly novelist, although perhaps he is guilty of excessive dependence on graphic humor in the "hooligan" approach to his humorous features. Set in an imaginary Babylon, it narrates the vicissitudes of a group of sages, the twelve Akadémikos, who are persecuted by the High Priest of the city, Okrom, for the hatred that this subject has to any technical, cultural or scientific advance. The protection that King Nebuchadnezzar gives them is not enough to free them from persecution. Ideologically very simple in its approaches, it incurs voluntarily in anachronisms in order to present history as an eternal struggle between Hate and Love, Terror and Humor.

He directed two films (País S.A., 1975, and El bengador Gusticiero y su pastelera madre, 1977) and four humor series on television, El Muliñandupelicascarabajo (1968), Nosotros (1969) and 24 horas aquí (1976), on TVE; and Deforme semanal (1991), on Telemadrid with his brother José María Fraguas. In radio, he participated in programs such as Protagonistas, by Luis del Olmo and La Ventana by Javier Sardá and Gemma Nierga, and before his death he was on No es un día cualquiera, by RNE, with Pepa Fernández.

In addition, in 2014 he presented and directed the television program Pecadores impequeibols in La 2 de TVE.

He died on 22 February 2018 at 76 years of age in Madrid, a victim of pancreatic cancer.

Style

As a comedian, he used very characteristic black-line speech bubbles and a stylized language extracted directly from the street. «Inventor» of words and lexical idioms (gensanta, stupendo, bocata, firulillo, esborcio, jobreído, gürtélido, tontolcool, etc.), he was one of the few humorists with an ear sensitive to popular language. He also created, graphically, the taco or swearword crossed out in the texts of his drawings, gaining an attenuated lexical expression for some of his characters in a pure popular colloquial language.

Costumbrismo and social criticism occupy a fundamental place in his work. His strength was the critical vision of the situations of daily life. Forges created an extensive iconography of characters and comic situations that reflects the idiosyncrasy and sociology of contemporary Spain:

• Mariano, a frustrated bourgeois married to a fat woman named Concha, who represents the repressive conscience.
• The shipwrecked on a boring island that have to fight loneliness with a hypertrophy of fantasy.
• The Blasillos that represent rural and eternal Spain.
• The old ones that combine computer science and paletez[definition?].
• The office workers pissed off.
• The marriage buried in a huge bed.
• The potentate boss and asshole.
• The Americanized yuppie and idiot.
• The posh and imbecile brat.
• The alienated by football.
• The pissed off and subversive office worker.
• The off-hook that closes bars.
• The window pretensioner.
• The cloistered in the bunker.
• The deep official.
• The corrupt politician.
• The reactionary potentate.

A substantial part of his work is made up of albums on the history of Spain in comics and on computers for clumsy. He affirmed that in Spain it does not take inspiration to be a humorist. In 2007 he took part in the tribute book to

), on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, an album in which 30 artists of the world comic have drawn adventures of the aforementioned characters, but with their respective styles.

In 2008 he proposed to Spanish institutions the possibility of obtaining the support of graphic humorists from around the world to the UN Millennium Goals, a proposal that was officially presented at the

of Spain, showing to the media accredited before the high international organization, a DVD containing the explicit commitment of support for the dissemination of the referred Millennium Goals, by some of the main Ibero-American graphic humorists, as the initial coordinated action of the project.

In 2012, and on the proposal of the academic faculty of the

, he was appointed Technical Director of the Instituto Quevedo del Humor, the first specific university center founded in Spain to study humor in all its facets.

Honours and awards

Antonio Fraguas «Forges», who has never been a member of any jury, and who has never been presented personally or by third parties to any contest award, has several prizes for which you do not need to apply, such as the Freedom Award of Expression of the Union of Journalists of Spain; He is also an Honorary Member of the Journalists Association of Catalonia and is in possession of the Creu de Sant Jordi, the highest Catalan honour.

He won the Antonio de Sancha Prize (2001),

.

On 7 December 2007, the

In November 2009 the Association of Booksellers awarded him the Legend Award, for his constant defense of reading and books through his drawings.

In April 2011, the

Likewise, it receives the Onda Mediterránea award 2011. In December of the same year, it received the Emilio Castelar award, in the specialty of Communicative Efficacy, of the Cadiz journalists.

In May 2012, he received the

.

In 2013, the Rodolfo Benito Samaniego Foundation, in Alcalá de Henares, awarded him the Prize for Coexistence, Peace and Freedom.

In 2014, he was awarded the Artemio Precioso Prize for his work in defense of the environment. On the occasion of his 50 years of profession, he published a coupon for the

. In November of the same year he was awarded, unanimously by the jury, the Ibero-American Graphic Humor Award Quevedos.

On 28 January 2016, he was also named Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Alcalá.

On January 17, 2022, the Google Doodle in Spain celebrated Forge's 80th birthday.

References

External links

• Media related to Forges (Antonio Fraguas) at Wikimedia Commons
• Quotations related to Forges at Wikiquote (in Spanish)
• Official website (in Spanish)