Forges

Antonio Fraguas de Pablo, better known as Forges (17 January 1942 – 22 February 2018), was a Spanish graphic humorist. His artistic name is based on the translation to Catalan of the word fraguas. Born in Madrid, 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 was a bad student, but a great reader of Richmal Crompton and her William Brown books. He studied in Madrid high school (at the Cervantes Institute) and telecommunications engineering – which he did not finish – and Social Sciences. In 1956, at age 14, he began working as a telecine technician at Televisión Española and as an image mixer since 1962. He left the TVE staff as a Study Coordinator in 1973 to dedicate himself professionally to graphic humor. He had published his first drawing in 1964 in the newspaper Pueblo, by the hand of Jesús Hermida, and then went on to Informaciones. Jesús de la Serna entrusted him with the editorial joke. He did military service as an artillery fighter, and married Pilar Garrido Cendoya and had three daughters and a son; in 1970 he began to collaborate in Diez Minutos and worked in the humor magazines Hermano Lobo, Por Favor and El Jueves, and in the weekly Sábado Gráfico, Interviú, Lecturas, etc.

Since 1982 he published the editorial joke in Diario 16 and later in El Mundo, but he left this newspaper after having been one of its seven founders, and in 1995 he went on to sign El País's editorial joke.

In 1992 his novel Doce de Babilonia appears. Forges reveals himself as a fairly solid and orderly novelist, although perhaps he is guilty of excessive dependence on graphic humor in the "hooligan" approach to his humorous features. Set in an imaginary Babylon, it narrates the vicissitudes of a group of sages, the twelve Akadémikos, who are persecuted by the High Priest of the city, Okrom, for the hatred that this subject has to any technical, cultural or scientific advance. The protection that King Nebuchadnezzar gives them is not enough to free them from persecution. Ideologically very simple in its approaches, it incurs voluntarily in anachronisms in order to present history as an eternal struggle between Hate and Love, Terror and Humor.

He 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.

In addition, in 2014 he presented and directed the television program Pecadores impequeibols in La 2 de TVE.

He died on 22 February 2018 at 76 years of age in Madrid, a victim of pancreatic cancer.