Manuel Vázquez Gallego

• Name — Manuel Vázquez • Birth Name — Manuel Vázquez Gallego • Born — 24 January 1930 • Birthplace — Madrid • Died — 21 October 1995 • Place of death — Barcelona • Nationality — Spanish • Area — comics artist and writer • Alias — Vázquez, Sappo • Notable Works — * Las hermanas Gilda • La familia Cebolleta • Anacleto, agente secreto • Awards — Gran Premi del Saló, Comic Barcelona, 1990

The son of a railroad worker, his parents were friends with novelist Wenceslao Fernández Flórez and playwright Enrique Jardiel Poncela, who seemingly influenced Vázquez's humor. In the late 1940s he moved to Barcelona. In 1947, in the early years of Francoism, he was already publishing his comics in Flechas y pelayos, a children's magazine linked to Falange Española. The next year he created his first characters for Pulgarcito magazine, published by Editorial Bruguera, a Barcelona-based imprint of popular literature that dominated the comics market in Spain at the time. Discerning fact from myth in Vázquez's life is not without challenges, given the colorful stories about his erratic lifestyle and contradictory statements in interviews (by his own account, he was born in 1934, not 1930). A notorious loafer and swindler, he served time in prison in three separate occasions by his own account, one of them for the crime of bigamy, and fathered eleven children. He was also a gambler, frequenting several bingo houses in Barcelona. Vázquez's reputation as a serial defaulter became legendary in 1961, when fellow Brugueran Francisco Ibáñez reportedly modeled after Vázquez one of the characters in his strip 13, Rue del Percebe: the sketchy tenant in the building's attic, always dodging his creditors. Vázquez not only failed to dispel the rumors that he was the man in the attic, but further fueled his legend in a long-running series of semi-autobiographical comics, Los cuentos de Tío Vázquez ("Tales of Uncle Vázquez", 1968), portraying himself as a lovable rogue who never paid his debts. Whether these picaresque ways segued into indiscriminate abuse is a matter of discussion. In the late seventies, during Spain's transition into democracy, Vázquez started contributing to newly founded adult magazines such as El Papus, Hara-kiri, and later Makoki. This sort of work he often signed as "Sappo". Nevertheless, he continued producing children's comics for Bruguera until 1986, when the publisher ceased its activities, and even later under Ediciones B, which acquired and relaunched Bruguera's mastheads. He died from a stroke at the age of 65.

A star of the so-called "second generation" of the "Bruguera School" in the 1960s, Vázquez fully embodied the publisher's house style, with its schematically drawn characters, limited scenery, spoofs of social stereotypes, and plenty of slapstick. His art was particularly efficient, quick and dynamic, even more so the older he got. He earned a reputation for turning in pages in record times, especially in the seventies and onwards. Around 1990, he settled into a direct-to-ink process, bypassing the pencils stage. During his career at Bruguera he created a slew of popular characters such as Las Hermanas Gilda ("The Gilda Sisters", 1949), La familia Cebolleta ("The Cebolleta family", 1951), La familia Churumbel (1960), and arguably his most famous, Anacleto, agente secreto ("Anacleto, secret agent", a James Bond parody, in 1964). All these characters and many others appeared regularly in several magazines and have since been reprinted in numerous anthologies.