José Cabrero Arnal

José Cabrero Arnal or C. Arnal (September 6, 1909 in (Castilsabás (Huesca),—September 7, 1982 in Antibes, France^[1]) was a Spanish comics artist, who nevertheless worked in France for most of his career and was naturalized as French citizen. He is most famous for the comics series Pif le chien and Placid et Muzo.^[2]

Biography

During his youth in Barcelona he worked as cabinetmaker and as repairman of calculators. He published his very first graphic works in magazines like Pocholo or the famous TBO, with a character called Top, a humanized dog that later became the famous Pif le chien.^[3]

In 1936, after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he enrolled in the Republican militia and was forced into exile in France after the end of war.^[4] In 1940, while his adoptive country was under German occupation, he was captured and deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp, as were many other Republican exiles. He would not leave until the end of World War II, in 1945.^[5]

In 1946 he published the first cartoons of Placid et Muzo, an anthropomorphic fox and bear, in the weekly publication Vaillant, le journal de Pif.^[6] He was a frequent collaborator of L'Humanité, the newspaper of the French Communist Party. In this publication appeared for the first time in 1948 his most celebrated character, the dog Pif, and two years later he would draw Pif's inseparable partner, the cat Hercule, ending in the comic strip Pif et Hercule.

Pif gave name in 1969 to a magazine, Pif gadget,^[7] of great success during the 1970s, in which French and European cartoonists published their works, and which survived the death of its creator (with many cartoonists adopting Pif and Hercule into their own creations).

References