Miguel Gallardo

Animac is pleased to bestow on Miguel Gallardo (Lleida, 1955) the Lifetime Award 2022 for his brilliant career as an illustrator and narrator of graphic stories and for his overflowing imagination when expressing himself through his characters.

 

Gallardo is one of the most outstanding cartoonists and illustrators in the last forty years of our country. Known as the creator of Makoki in 1977, the most emblematic character of 1980s Spanish underground comics, he was also a founding member of and regular contributor to the historic countercultural magazine El Víbora. 

 

In the 1990s, Gallardo began a prolific career as a press and book illustrator, which culminated in a series of very personal graphic novels, full of autobiographical references, such as Un largo silencio (2011), about his father and the Spanish Civil War, or the acclaimed María y yo (2007), which tells of the adventures of her daughter with autism, for which he received the National Comics Award of Catalonia.

 

In 2009 Félix Fernández de Castro directed the documentary María y yo featuring Gallardo and Maria, and with animated segments. Later, Gallardo directed the animated short El viaje de María (2010), a wonderful autobiographical lesson about how a father and mother deal with their daughter’s autism. 

 

In 2015 he resumed the story of his life with Maria with the graphic novel María cumple 20 años on the new challenges following adolescence, and he has recently published Algo extraño me pasó camino de casa (2020), where he tells of his hospital experience when he had a brain tumour removed and his later life in the midst of the pandemic.

 

Along with being a regular contributor as an illustrator in national media outlets such as La Vanguardia and Diari Ara and international publications such as the Herald Tribune, The New York Times and The New Yorker, Gallardo has chaired the APIC (Professional Association of Illustrators of Catalonia). 

 

Committed to shedding light on illustration and autism, he has become a charismatic communicator in these fields and has created extraordinary workshops and educational materials.