Hector Mariñosa
Barcelona (EFE) that is, I am a cartoonist, ”proclaims the actor after the publication of“ Daily Neuras ”, where he brings together his most outstanding cartoons and comic strips.
In an interview with Efe, Paco Mir recalled that, before joining Carles Sans and Joan Gràcia in the brilliant gesture theater group, he had a promising career as a cartoonist in the last stage of “TBO”, “El Jueves”, “Diario de Barcelona”, “Interviú” or “El Periódico”, among other media, and reveals that, in reality, he has never stopped drawing, even if he did not publish his gags.
The cartoonist Jose Luis Martín, who signs the prologue of “Neuras Diarias” (Today’s Issues) with the title “The other Paco Mir”, makes a football comparison and “says that, if as a cartoonist I am ‘Cristiano Ronaldo’, like Tricicle I am ‘Leo Messi’, and that one has eclipsed the other”, boasts Mir with a sense of humor.
Looking back, Mir reveals that as a child “the first thing I wanted to be was a cartoonist and at the same time an aviation pilot”, and that he began in graphic humor copying jokes from cartoonists like Cesc, Muntanyola, El Perich or Mingote, who It marked him especially because in his house they had his book “History of the people”, getting to publish a satirical magazine at school with some classmates.
Later he enrolled in the Faculty of Fine Arts, a time when he went around the newsrooms of humor magazines with his portfolio of drawings in the hope of being admitted, something that came to his regret a little in the magazine “TBO ”, where he was part of the group Quatricomia-4, with which he managed to “renew the aesthetics of ‘TBO’ and precipitate its closure”.
He explains that, as a cartoonist, “I’ve always liked short jokes more and the most I’ve done are two-page comic strips. I also like the comic strip a lot, because it is still a small piece of theatre, presentation, middle and end, but the long comic strip really makes me lazy”.
multiple influences
He admits that as a cartoonist he has received influences from almost all those who have impacted him, some of the Franco-Belgian comics, such as Sempé and Franquin, who have “a lot of humor without words”, and he believes that all artists “steal” from everywhere in order to configure a new ‘monster’, a ‘Frankenstein’ that has a little bit of everyone”.
Mir points out that as a humorist he has two styles, “one more of a clear line, more simple, and another a little more of a loose-handed cartoonist”, in addition to his line of “flies”, in which the drawing is limited to a point and two wings and “the joke is in the absurd little dialogue they have.”
Mir was beginning to establish himself in the world of graphic humor and in 1981 he combined his work in El Jueves with a daily strip in the “Diario de Barcelona”, but a year later the theater crossed his path and joined Tricicle which , “in half a year it has already become a theater company that rotates a lot, which makes the history of drawing more complicated for me”.
“Even so, during one summer, while I was already with Tricicle, I was replacing José Luis Martín in “El Periódico”, and I collaborated with a monthly theater magazine, but they weren’t daily jobs either.”
In that monthly magazine, “Teatre BCN”, in which he collaborated from 1999 to 2010, he found himself like a fish in water, because “I am a spectator, actor, director, producer, programmer… and I knew all these little miseries of the profession , which I made fun of from within” as a graphic humorist.
The pandemic brought him closer to drawing again
The period of the pandemic helped Paco Mir to resume his passion for drawing by having “more time to make this little effort, this mental gymnastics of making a joke every day, and not losing his hand or his mind”, some drawings that he made for himself and that he also took the opportunity to publish on social networks.
Asked about what is similar and what is different between the graphic joke and the numbers that Tricicle did on stage, he indicates that, even though they are apparently different, some of his ideas as a cartoonist became Tricicle gags, and that pages that published in magazines had a second life in monologues that he produced for “Lo+Plus” or in “sketches” for the TV3 series “Dinamita”.
In this sense, for Paco Mir “in humor, as in everything, the idea comes first and then the idea has its medium, and the medium can be a drawing, a comic, a dialogue on the radio, a podcast…” .
Regarding the limits of humor, Mir admits that now “everyone has very thin skin and I believe that humor by definition has to strike a chord to make you laugh”, adding that in this area, the limit is marks “common sense and good taste”.
He says Tricicle never exceeded that limit, “but not because it was in the company ‘bylaws’, we didn’t have to make any effort, we just didn’t want to offend or cross any lines to make people laugh”.