“I vote for Brios!”: The masks warrior wields the sword once more with the publication of his adventures | Culture | EUROtoday

“Be your iron!” The masks warrior tanded when his sword crashed with that of an enemy. This hero of Tebeo, at all times prepared to struggle in opposition to the evil on responsibility, noticed his first quantity 80 years in the past, on October 24, 1944, born of the creativeness of Manuel Gago García (1925-1980). Now he exhibits his muscle tissues once more to cover his identification within the bookstores. The Dolmen publishing home has taken the character’s witness – whose writer was impressed, amongst others, in Flash Gordon -, with the restoration of his first 13 deliveries in a black and white quantity and assist format, corresponding to the unique. In addition, he’s publishing volumes that choose his newest adventures, these of 1979 and 1980. The subsequent one leaves exactly on Thursday, May 29. “It is aimed at ancient fans, collectors and children or grandchildren of those who told them these stories,” says the Tebeos and Articulista screenwriter Eduardo de Salazar.

Gago, the creator of the warrior, was a toddler keen on studying and drawing, the eldest of 5 brothers, who needed to go away the research to get to work with solely 14 years as a result of his father, captain of the Army of the Republic, was three years imprisoned by Francoism after the civil battle. With the household in Albacete, from Madrid, in 1942 he was revealed his first cartoon, however shortly after he bought sick of tuberculosis. His brothers took a board to the Sanatorium and from there he despatched his proposals to publishers from Valencia and Barcelona. “After leaving, I drew at home, in a hammock, with a board on top,” recalled the writer himself. With 18 years he posted El Cuternillo The sacred oath, In the Valenciana publishing home, set within the taking of Granada by the Catholic Monarchs and impressed by a preferred novel, The hundred Knights of Isabel la Católica (1931), by Rafael Pérez. It was the germ of The masks warrior.

In a second of paper shortage and few licenses to publish, nothing presaged that in October 1944 a syllable of twenty-two years and 668 numbers would start. Franco’s censorship permitted the publication of the Valencian publishing home as a result of he thought-about that he didn’t attacked “moral or regime” or had “literary or documentary value.”

In these preliminary vignettes, together with his fashionable shout of “Vote to Brios!”, When he entered fight, there was a number of textual content and a easy line to inform how the Count of Roca lives within the distress for the reason that evil Ali-Kan, Arab Chief, has rapt his spouse, pregnant. Years later, a mysterious younger man broadcasts to the depend that his spouse was killed by Ali-Kan, however that earlier than he died he revealed to him who he was. However, the boy can’t hold his father as a result of for years he has fought on the Muslim facet in opposition to Christians. So to redeem herself, she turns her life and decides to struggle in opposition to the Moors, however on her personal, as a result of Christians see him as a renegade, and decides to make him masked. The masks warrior was born, whose most profitable numbers have been distributed 800,000 copies, stories Dolmen.

Eduardo de Salazar, who along with the cartoonist Miguel Quesada Ramos have given continuity to the warrior with new installments, corresponding to The imposter (2022) y The Treasury of Motamid (2023), factors out that it’s “a tragic character” and “misunderstood, both in the argument and the Spanish history of the comic.” “He is a man between two worlds, the Muslim and the Christian, and in both he shows that there are good and bad. There are those who think he was a Francoist character, but in his vignettes there is no ideology. Gago set him in the reconquest, but immediately he took him out of there and made him travel half the world.”

Marisa Gago, daughter of the cartoonist, provides on the telephone that her father “was a communist in the sense that what he won distributed him with his mother and his brothers.” “He never told us about the Civil War. We only knew long after my grandmothers had met when they brought food to jail to their husbands.”

The comics, because of postwar youngsters, turned a hit to the purpose that the household moved in 1946 to Valencia, the place the writer was, which registered the title of the hero, one thing that might trigger painful penalties for Gago sooner or later. This, like different artists from these years, multiplied to create new characters, to which it joined that the warrior went from Quinconal to weekly.

Manuel Gago Quesada, son of the cartoonist, remembers his father “stuck to his board from 9 in the morning to 12 at night, he just rested to eat.” While her daughter remembers seeing him within the room drawing on a dashboard “I didn’t talk much. I had some pages in which I made drawings and under the character put something about the character.” Salazar factors out that the cartoonist was so keen that till after 200 numbers the character’s title didn’t happen: Adolfo de Moncada.

In the sixties, the comics fall in gross sales in Spain. According to the Dolmen publishing home, it was on tv, however Salazar sees one other trigger. “Until the fifties, Francoism did not deal with children’s publications, but then began to catalog if they had to be for children or for youth audiences, and it is censored: violence had to be softened, remove some expressions …”. Gago’s daughter says she heard her father joke: “I don’t know if this is going to be admitted by Father Vázquez.” Then he knew he referred to the censor final title.

To this was added that “the comic industry was cheaper to bring material from outside to create,” provides Salazar. The Guerrero disappears in 1966 and Gago has to open a bookstore and is reconvisaged in consultant of the sale of chromos of an editorial that he had created together with his brothers.

In 1972, Editorial Valenciana reissues from the primary difficulty the adventures of the hero, however in shade and vertical format, and repeats triumph, regardless of the reluctance of Gago himself. The cartoonist combines the comics of his favourite character with these of others and from 1979 new adventures are revealed. Your exercise is strenuous.

In the early Nineteen Eighties, a proposal that excited him got here to him: take the warrior to the cinema. “He came home with a check of one million advance pesetas,” says his daughter. “I was very happy, but when I was telling it, the phone rang and it was from the publisher, to tell him that they had registered the character and that the movie was not going to be made. My father broke the check at that same moment.”

After that nice disgust, the warrior adventures would finish the dying of its creator. Sick, Gago returns, like a child, to attract from the hospital mattress, however this time he doesn’t get better and dies on December 29, 1980, at 55. With the anticipated materials, the writer stretched the character till February 7, 1981. The final difficulty was titled The tragedy. They have been the final of the 27,000 pages drawn by Gago.

Since then, The masks warrior He has resurrected a number of instances with a disparate outcome and has obtained taxes, corresponding to Carlos Giménez, writer of legendary comics as Paracuellos o Professionalsthrough which he portrayed, exactly, the arduous lifetime of the comedian artist in Spain. Giménez writes, in one of many new volumes of the Guerrero, that within the Spanish postwar interval “this was, without a doubt, the character that had the most success.” “Gago was the inventor of a type of cartoon imitated and followed by many authors.”