![]() The third and most flagrant replaces a gigantic and hilarious cartoon in which the agents sneak into East Germany and everybody shoots at them (“Headquarters? Yes, send six fighter-bombers! And prepare the surface-to-surface missiles!”) with six in which Mortadelo acknowledged having pawned the crown jewels and turned around to get them back (“Well… matter settled!”). However, in the German version they doubt whether they are in Frankfurt or New York because there are “too many vandals on the loose” and end up arriving in Berlin in the trunk of the soccer coach’s car, which was leaking oil (justifying that they were muddy to continue the story). In the original, the agents try to cross the Berlin Wall from underneath but end up unblocking a pipe: the bad smell makes them pass through, leaving everyone disgusted. ![]() The second one is completely original, and it is worth reading to understand how difficult it is to make a good Mortadelo comic book. The drawing tries to imitate Ibáñez’s, but it is between a copycat and forced. Finally, a rabbit appears with the slogan “The train to the West is a pest!” and asking them for a donation. This could not be allowed in Germany, so what they discover instead is that they have arrived in Frankfurt, where there is a demonstration around the train. In the first censored page (and translated thanks to the Unofficial Page of Mortadelo and Filemón), Filemón discovers that they have arrived in East Berlin and end up knocking out a policeman who asks them for their papers. And of course, to avoid problems between the two sides, all references to East Berlin were deleted in the German country. The trip to Germany in question is in search of The Rat and The Pachyderm, two jewel thieves who have stolen Queen Elizabeth II’s jewels (“Her Majesty, the Queen, will have to attend the opening ceremony of the Parliament with a beret because of the theft of her crown and other jewels that blah… blah…”). The thing is that Ibáñez was so grateful to Germany that between 19 he would serialize in Mortadelo magazine a story that would have our agents going around Bavaria or Berlin: In Germany. The last way Mortadelo and Filemón would be known in Germany was as Fred and Jeff, the name given to the VHS edition of the short films by Estudio Vara. Flip and Flap worked, paradoxically, for the OMA (“Organisation für Meister-Agenten”) and the Super was called “Mr. Later, the agents would be known as Flip & Flap. ![]() So much so that he even created a character that resembled his German publisher’s secretary, the later ignored Irma. Small changes that did not prevent Ibáñez from signing Mortadelo comics and comics in Germany. Clever and Smart were still working for the TIA (which instead of ‘Aeronautical Investigation Technicians’ would now be ‘Trans-Internationaler Agentering’), but instead of fighting against GRANDMOTHER they were fighting against the OMA (‘Organisation Militanter Agenten’, it should be said that ‘Oma’ means ‘Grandmother’ in German). Ibáñez had just finished the twelfth long comic book of the TIA agents, ‘Gatolandia 76’, when his cartoons began to land in a Germany still divided by the Berlin Wall. ![]() Don’t run, no, you fool, I’m going to give you censorship! Landing in Germany But maybe nowhere as much as in Germany, where Clever & Smart (the translation of those places) came to have not only two unpublished comics in Spain, but three censored and redrawn pages of an adventure made in honor of the German country. Although it may seem strange to us because it is still something very “caní”, Mortadelo and Filemón have been a huge success around the world. When we talk about the “ Spain brand” we often forget one of the products that is most recognized beyond our borders.
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