Maria will no longer have anyone to draw her like her father did. That “despicable sweet potato” that grew “on the roof”, as he himself baptized the brain tumor that was diagnosed in early 2020, displaying his proverbial and undramatized humor, has won the pulse he had with Miguel Gallardo, one of the most beloved comic cartoonists since in the 70s he co-created that rogue and crazy quinqui Makoki, one of the icons of Barcelona’s ‘underground’, and managed to get autism, which his daughter suffered from, out of the social closet, recounting it in the autobiographical vignettes of ‘María y yo’ (Astiberri) in 2007.
The cartoonist, pioneer of the graphic novel, has died this Monday in Barcelona at the age of 66, leaving behind a career, recognized among others with the Grand Prize of the Comic Fair of the Catalan capital, with the Ciutat de Barcelona Prize, which was awarded the town hall just a week ago, and with the National Comic Prize of the Catalan Generalitat.
Gallardo (Lleida, 1955), a year ago, recounted in ‘Something strange happened to me on the way home’ his experience after learning that he had a brain tumor, just before the pandemic, and how it was removed. He was coming home from the hospital in full confinement to start a treatment with which he was hopeful. But the cancer came back. Just three weeks ago, at the end of January, he married his partner of recent years, Karin du Croo. He himself posted a photo of both, newlyweds, on his Instagram account.
For the cartoonist, discovering the disease was for him to live “in a science fiction script of the bad guys & rdquor ;. “When I woke up from the operation, to flee from fear, death was a friend, I almost wanted it to escape from all that, just like a child calls his mother, you look for someone to shake your hand and get you out of there -he confessed to this diary. As with the pandemic, we see that we cannot decide on our lives.” “The fears are still there. Every day is new. As with the coronavirus, we are trying to recover a normality that does not exist. You cannot afford the past because everything is new. I forced myself to recover my natural curiosity to see what the next few years will be like and my appetite for life”, he was honest then, who always had a positive thought, a joke, a courageous way of facing the bad. He tried to go “‘palante ‘, always ‘palante'”, as his father taught him.
Related news
To him, in ‘A long silence’ (Astiberri), he gave voice to his memory of the Civil War, silent during 40 years of dictatorship. He was in fact one of the first cartoonists who rescued family experiences of the conflict in comics, mixing vignettes with the diaries of his father, Francisco Gallardo Sarmiento, who survived a more than humble childhood in his native Linares, a premature orphan, the bombs, the Ebro and Teruel fronts, hunger and concentration camps in exile in the south of France, and the fear of being shot as a republican when returning to Franco’s Spain.
Arriving from his native Lleida, after studying at the Escola Massana in Barcelona after failing to enter Fine Arts, he created Gallardo a Makoki together with the screenwriter Juanito Mediavilla, a benchmark of the ‘underground’ scene of the 70s and 80s. character, wearing a robe and a helmet with wires on his head, was a symbol of the most lumpen Barcelona, bathed in crime, sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, in the transgressive orgy of the incipient transition, which he toured with Basca – Emo, Morgan, Cuco and El Niñato-, characters inspired by the authors themselves and their professional colleagues. The first short story appeared in 1977 in the magazine ‘Disco Exprés’, under the title ‘Revolt in the phrenopathy’, but it would reappear in the pages of ‘El Víbora’ with the cartoon ‘Fuga en la Modelo’. A series, which Gallardo himself recognized that if they had done it today they would have been sued by “feminists, Argentines, retirees, disabled… & rdquor ;.