The spreading of technical knowledge in post-Civil War Spain: the example of Josep Escobar

ABSTRACT

Spanish animation went through a Golden Age after the Civil War (1936–1939). No fewer than four feature films were made in seven years. The making of animated cartoons in Barcelona began in the 1920s, reaching a technical zenith in the 1940s through the efforts of press illustrators and comic strip authors. This paper examines the development of Spanish animation language through one of Josep Escobar’s comic strips. Escobar shows how illustrations could be used to explain technical matters to children. Using comic strips to spread technical know-how was uncommon in post-Civil War Spain. It is time to revisit the history of Spanish animation through the eyes of a pioneering comic strip author who had closely followed American and European advances in the field from the early days.

KEYWORDS:

• Technology
• comic strip
• film industry
• classical animation
• post-war

Acknowledgments

I’m thankful to Joan Manuel Soldevilla, Antoni Guiral, and Lluís Giralt for sharing their insights and expertise. I would also like to thank Andrew Spence for polishing the final draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Spelt out, the letters ‘T-B-O’ in Spanish sounds like Te veo [I see you], given that the sound for ‘V’ is generally indistinguishable from ‘B’ in Castilian. Children would have found the name amusing, not least because of the deliberate spelling mistake with two identically pronounced letters.

2. Román Gubern states that the historietas [comic strips] have three characteristic elements: ‘(1) A sequence of panels to articulate a story; (2) the need for at least one regular character; (3) speech balloons for the characters’ (Gubern 1987, 217).

3. Lo Duca, J. M., 1957. El dibujo animado. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Losange.

4. Alary, V., 2007. Le Tebeo Espagnol. Investigacões, Lingüística e Teoría literaria, 20 (1), 12.

5. Alary, V., 2007. Le Tebeo Espagnol. Investigacões, Lingüística e Teoría literaria, 20 (1), 21.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria Pagès

Maria Pagès gained her PhD in Communication at Universitat de Vic-UCC with a thesis on Post-War Spanish animation. She works as an illustrator and an animation researcher at GREDITS (Design and Social Transformation Research Group) at BAU, Centre Universitari de Disseny (university design centre). She is also a teacher of computer tools and animation in the Bachelor of Arts programme at Escola d’Art La Industrial (art school). As a researcher, she had worked for the Catalan Film Archive collecting data for the restoration of an animated film from the fifties.