Mort & Phil

Mort & Phil
Mort and Phil in the falles.
Publication information
Publisher	Bruguera Ediciones B
Genre	Humor, Political satire, Slapstick, Farce, Adventure
Publication date	20 January 1958–present
Number of issues	194
Main character(s)	Mortadelo, Filemón, El Súper, Ofelia and Bacterio
Creative team
Writer(s)	Francisco Ibañez

Mortadelo redirects here, for the magazine see Mortadelo (magazine)

Mort & Phil (Spanish: Mortadelo y Filemón) is one of the most popular Spanish comics series, published in more than a dozen countries. It appeared for the first time in 1958 in the children's comic-book Pulgarcito drawn by Francisco Ibáñez. The series features Mort (Spanish: Mortadelo), the tall, bald master of disguise named after mortadella, and his bossy partner, the shorter, pudgier Phil (Spanish: Filemón) Pi.

Initially, they were private detectives operating as Mortadelo y Filemón, Agencia de Información, but now both serve as secret agents in the Técnicos de Investigación Aeroterráquea, or T.I.A. ("Tía" is the Spanish word for "aunt", a spoof on CIA, with T.I.A. translating into "Aeroterrestrial Investigation Technicians".

One of the main features of the series is its extremely slapstick humor, so that the characters constantly suffer mishaps such as falls from heights, explosions, being crushed by all kinds of heavy objects (pianos, safes, etc..), usually without the consequences lasting more than one panel.

Mort and Phil can be described as a pair of walking catastrophes, and no matter what kind of mission they are assigned they always manage to get it wrong. The results are almost invariably extremely violent, and most often directed towards Phil. At the T.I.A. (Spanish for "aunt", a parody of the CIA as well as "U.N.C.L.E.", the main organization of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), which combats "enemy organizations" like R.A.N.A. ("frog") or A.B.U.E.L.A. ("grandmother"), they interact with their boss, the bad-tempered Superintendente Vicente; with Professor Bacterio, a black-bearded, disastrous scientist parodying James Bond's Q; and with the fat, blonde secretary Ofelia, a parody of Moneypenny, whose attempts at seducing Mort always fail.