There was no hunger in Franco’s Spain, there was a massive food crisis that killed at least 200,000 people due to diseases caused by starvation or malnutrition. The difference is significant, and it’s about both the magnitude of what happened and the way it’s hidden behind it. euphemistic famines and persistent droughts. This thesis is gaining ground among historians and was developed, for example, by Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco in his research ‘Famine in Spain, the dictatorship of Franco 1939-1952’, published in the ‘Journal of Contemporary History’ in 2020. The character of Carpanta, created by Josep Escobar, whose 75th anniversary is celebrated in an anthology, Great goal against Francoism.
Nothing more can happen in ‘Table 13’, the giddy debut of the homeless man’s cartoon, which aired in ‘Pulgarcito’ in 1947. The Baroness notices that there are 13 people sitting at the table and orders the butler to avoid bad luck. do something. Carpanta, still unnamed, knocks on the door to ask for more food, and the butler sees the light: she dresses the homeless man in a coat and top hat, disguises him as a Bulgarian marquis, and has him sit at the feast. From then on, the beggar’s hair falls out: he serves his entire plate of cannelloni, smokes a bottle of wine, knocks on a restaurant, takes off his shoes while smoking a cigar and places pins on the table, knocking out the baroness when called, forcing the baroness to dance with him and saying, “I’m Tarzan!” Maybe a devastating frenzy before jumping off the balcony Felipe Borrayo and Miguel Gallardo They were on their minds 30 years later when they were filming ‘Frenopathic Rebellion’, the debut of ‘underground’ comic book hero Makoki and another wild action genius.
It is easy to interpret 13 on the table as a partition. unorganized class struggleNo matter how much Marx despised the lumpenproletariat to which Carpanta belonged, or at least a slap the board. Escobar’s biography points out that the comic is not just a hooliganism and has a political background. Born in Barcelona in 1908, Escobar made clear his commitment to the Republic during the Civil War in magazines such as ‘L’Esquella de la Torratxa’ and ‘La Campana de Gràcia’. His anti-fascist militancy cost him a prison sentence at the end of the contest. The cartoonist Méndez Álvarez was even worse: he was executed. Escobar obeyed Almost two years in the Modelo prison in Barcelona and was purged from the post office staff.
He was soon christened Carpanta (“fierce hunger,” according to the “Dictionary of the Spanish Language”), and wore his characteristic frock coat, recliner, bow tie, and straw hat.
A 1949 cartoon by Carpanta ‘Oh reservoirs!’ , but usually at the last ‘joke’ his wits turn against him. Actually, Carpanta has a solution: from camp to camp he recruits many like him, all the tattered ones stand on the wall of the reservoir with a tube in their mouths, sticking fried chicken in their noses, their mouths are watering and fill the hopper. The chicken they gave Carpanta as a trophy was made out of cardboard, disappointing as usual but this is the least of it. The critical purpose of such a grotesque scene seems indisputable. Misery and swamps come togethera denial and a Francoist flag.
Album “Carpanta”. ’75th anniversary’ doesn’t fall under the character’s political readings, for the rest a lovable and anachronistic thug from a certain moment. At most, Paco Roca writes in the foreword to ‘Humiliation and humiliation’: “Carpanta has become the symbol of Spain, rendered invisible by the dictatorship, the ‘Knot’ or the novels that are not featured in the press and almost never in the cinema.
The volume features Escobar’s unpublished drawings and reproductions of Carpanta’s original pages, which were donated as candy by the artist’s heirs. But the important thing is the ordinary records of a character. The complex was dynamite in the publishing house Bruguera. Like Doña Urraca by Jorge (stage name of Miguel Bernet), the other group of saboteurs of the regime under the protection of children’s humor, personification of the intense blackness of Francoism.