Pumby #15
Pumby #15, cover-dated December 3, 1955, belongs to the foundational run of what became the most widely read children's comic magazine in postwar Spain — a biweekly anthology that within a few years would displace every rival in the Spanish children's market. Published just seven months after the magazine's April 1955 launch, the issue falls squarely in the era when the full ensemble of the series' recurring cast was being assembled for the first time, making each early issue a building block in the collective creative vocabulary of the Valencian school of comics. The anthology format — pairing José Sanchis's flagship anthropomorphic-cat strips with supporting strips by Palop, Edgar, Liceras, and others — established the template that the magazine would follow across all 1,204 of its numbered issues and that would earn it Spain's Premio Nacional de Revistas para Niños three separate times.
Sell my copy
Have this issue — or a whole collection? Get a fair offer from us, skip the marketplace fees and the hassle.
We Buy Collections ▸History
Editorial Valenciana launched the Pumby magazine in April 1955 deliberately targeting younger readers than its existing title Jaimito, recruiting most of Jaimito's stable of artists for the new publication. The character Pumby himself — a black cat with a white muzzle, designed by José Sanchis Grau during a period of convalescence following a serious accident — had debuted the previous year in Jaimito #260, and the new magazine took his name and his creator's vision as its spine. Sanchis's colleague Jesús Liceras was responsible for most of the covers in these early years and also contributed his own strip, Renato y Sapete, while José Palop brought his bovine character Becerrín and the artist known as Edgar contributed the wolf-and-red-riding-hood parody Caperucita Encarnada, both of which became long-running fixtures of the anthology.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Pumby #15 is dated December 3, 1955 — confirmed by the Palop author entry on Tebeosfera, which lists the issue's date explicitly.
- The issue was published by Editorial Valenciana (Valencia, Spain) in the magazine's inaugural year, just seven months after issue #1 (April/May 1955).
- The titular character, Pumby 'el gatito feliz,' was created by José Sanchis Grau, who debuted the character in Jaimito #260 (second half of 1954) before it headlined its own magazine.
- Becerrín — the young bull character present in this issue — was created by José María Palop ('Palop') specifically for the Pumby magazine in 1955, making the earliest issues of the run the character's introduction period.
- Caperucita Encarnada (with El Lobo as her recurring antagonist) was a strip created by the artist known as Edgar for the Pumby anthology; the name 'Encarnada' (scarlet) was used in place of 'Roja' (red) in conformity with Francoist-era censorship guidelines that avoided the politically charged word 'rojo/roja.'
- Renato y Sapete was the strip contributed to the magazine by Jesús Liceras, who during these early years also produced most of the magazine's covers.
- Trompy, another character catalogued in this issue, was drawn by Nin and appeared throughout the magazine's run, later being reprinted in the Libros Ilustrados reprint series.
- The early-run format of Pumby consisted of staple-bound cuadernos of approximately 16 pages in a roughly 24×17 cm format (issues 1–34), with interior pages alternating between full color and two-color (black and red) printing.