[AUCA] "MONY"

Aventuras de Foronda, el de la tripa redonda / Que al derecho y al revés es idiota y es Marqués / Aventures de Foronda, "Emperador de la Ronda" / Que pel dret i pel revés és idiota i és Marqués

[Barcelona, n.d. ca 1930]. Broadside auca, 62cm x 43cm; printed in black on pale green coated paper. Story in 24 cartoon panels with printed captions in both Spanish and Catalán. Old folds, with mild toning at folds and margins; Very Good or better.

A great example of the satirical auca, a comic broadside form popularized in Catalunya beginning in the mid-19th century. The text is a scathing satire on the real-life industrialist Mariano de Foronda y González Bravo (1873-1961), who is depicted here as a rotund little autocrat who, having parlayed an undistinguished military career into extraordinary wealth as the head of the Madrid trolley system, abuses his underpaid workers and embezzles millions from the International Exposition of 1929. Eventually, Bravo accumulates so much wealth that King Alfonso, depicted here as an obsequious, genuflecting toady of the right, makes him a marqués. In the final two panels, Alfonso abdicates his throne and Foronda, left without a protector, flees Spain for Argentina, absconding with his ill-gotten gains. Alfonso's abdication took place in 1930, providing our conjectured date of publication.

A humorous and highly characteristic use of the auca form for satirizing the royalist and fascist aspirations of the Spanish ruling class, a theme that would grow more strident in the years leading up to the Civil War. Of the artist "Mony," whose signature appears in print in the final panel, we have been able discover nothing; no other works are attributed to them in OCLC and they are not listed in Carulla's index of Spanish Civil War artists. For this broadside, OCLC notes a single location (UC San Diego); not catalogued in KVK or JISC.

Price: $300.00

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