Forges: Google doodle celebrates 80th birthday of Spanish cartoonist

Today Google doodle to celebrate the birthday of Spanish cartoonist, author, television writer, and film director Antonio Fraguas de Pablo. He is also known as Forges. He is widely considered among the nation’s most significant graphic humorists of his era. His artistic name is based on the translation to Catalan of the word fraguas.

In his signature style of simple, thick, black outlines, Forges provided the Spanish public with a satirical yet compassionate lens into some 50 years of the country’s history.

Antonio Fraguas de Pablo was born in Madrid, Spain on this day in 1942. He was the son of a Catalan mother and Galician father (the writer and journalist Antonio Fraguas Saavedra), was baptized with the name Rafael Antonio Benito Fraguas de Pablo, and spent his childhood in a large family in which he is the second of nine brothers.

He wanted to become a cartoonist from a young age. He studied in Madrid high school (at the Cervantes Institute) and telecommunications engineering – which he did not finish – and Social Sciences.

In 1956, at 14, he began to work as a technician for the public broadcaster Televisión Española, and while there, he published his first cartoon in the newspaper Pueblo in 1964. He continued to publish his cartoons over the following years, and in 1973, he finally left his job to realize his childhood dream of becoming a full-time cartoonist.

Forges quickly rose in popularity, filling newspaper pages with a subversive cast of cartoon characters who helped the public to process an unfolding evolution in Spanish society. Over the decades that followed, he put out many thousands of cartoons that explored everything from new technology to the discovery of the Higgs boson particle. A true creative powerhouse, Forges 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. He died on 22 February 2018 at 76 years of age in Madrid, a victim of pancreatic cancer.

Forges received countless accolades throughout his career, including Spain’s Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts in 2011.

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