How Forges Captured the Housing Bubble Before Economists Did

Forges foresaw the crash when banks were selling 40-year mortgages

When did Spain start warning that housing was a trap? While news channels celebrated every construction crane and savings banks handed out apartments like prizes, a bald man from Bilbao published a daily cartoon in El País that, viewed today, is a little chilling. A man dreaming of hearing a child he doesn't have crying, and then waking up: it was the mortgage. Paco, that character with a forty-year debt hanging around his neck, has existed long before the property market collapsed on everyone. The idea belongs to Forges, and anyone who remembers it now knows why half of Spain laughs and cries at the same time.

This isn't the country that discovered the crisis in 2008. It's the country that had been seeing the joke since 2004 and calling it an exaggeration.

The humorist who warned of the bubble during the party

In April 2004, with cheap credit and the word "slowdown" still on the lips of optimists, Forges was already drawing queues, scaffolding, and couples signing for what they couldn't afford. The prevailing narrative then wasn't financial, it was comedic: the joke was applauded and the page was turned. The cartoon of a couple awakened by a baby that turns out to be the loan payment summarizes, better than any report from the Banco de España (Bank of Spain), the mental mechanics of an entire generation.

The striking thing is the date. The bubble began to deflate years later; the graphic warning arrived before it burst. That makes Forges somewhat uncomfortable: a chronicler who didn't need data from the INE (National Statistics Institute), just to look out the window. Some argue that his housing cartoons are the best emotional record of an era; others retort that a joke is a joke, not a prediction. A sterile debate: the cartoon worked in both directions, as a mirror and as a prophecy.

Paco, the 40-year mortgage, and the portrait of everyday antiestéticar

There's a recurring character throughout this archive who isn't a financial metaphor: Paco. The man who isn't alone. The man "we love." Behind the joke lies an intuition that no bank brochure admitted: debt isn't suffered alone, it's forcibly shared, familiarly, generationally, embedded in the pillow. The mortgage as the fourth member of the household.

The scene is funny until it stops being funny. The author spent half a century drawing the same thing: the common citizen tightening his belt while the antiestéticast was being shared upstairs. And his success wasn't predicting the crash (anyone with common sense saw the mess) but capturing the humor of resignation, which is the only bearable way to live in debt.

The Pen War: Is Forges Better Than El Roto?

As the archive pogre, the conversation widens, and the classic fight appears. El Roto, they say, takes more risks; his stroke is less gentle, his message less digestible. Someone summarizes it with a phrase circulating in gossip circles: "Forges is God, but El Roto is Nietzsche." The joke contains a fundamental critical judgment: it questions whether making people laugh is enough or if it's necessary to cause pain.

The answer isn't unanimous. There are those who defend that El Roto goes where the other doesn't dare, and those who reply that a humorist writing for a major newspaper is always bound by its editorial line. That reproach, repeated over and over, doesn't distinguish much between signatures: all major press cartoonists work with their brand attached to their wrist. The novelty wasn't Forges. It was the format.

The other name that repeats ad nauseam is Manel Fontdevila, with strips about evictions, indictments, and weddings that serve as a thermometer of current events. Along with Bernardo Vergara, Alfons López, or JRMora, the daily cartoon became the only editorial piece read and shared via WhatsApp screenshots.

The Accusation That Never Left: A Partisan Cartoonist

No public figure in this country escapes the charge of serving the opposing side. Forges was labeled a left-wing cartoonist, and El Roto a propagandist for his newspaper. There's an argument that graphic humor only tolerates criticism of certain targets, and the misdeeds of the opposing power are drawn with kid gloves. It's the old complaint of editorial bias, applied with equal energy to different signatures.

The detail is that neither group has moved from their position. The discussion about whether a cartoonist is free or a talented employee is almost as old as the press itself, and it's not resolved with a cartoon: it's resolved with the paycheck, which is almost never published. Meanwhile, the public decides with their eyes: if the image moves them, they forgive the bias; if not, they use it as an excuse.

From the Bubble to Capitalism Without Alternative: How the Debate Evolved

Over the years, the archive ceases to be a tribute to the cartoonist and becomes a diary of disillusionment. In 2016, in the midst of the American election hangover, the conversation shifts to something broader than a joke about mortgages: it discusses whether the system proved to have no real alternative and whether even political criticism itself was absorbed as merchandise. The circulating thesis is uncomfortable and not supported by data, but it well explains the tone: "When parties and advertising laugh at a possible revolution, it means capitalism has won," writes—sarcastically and without irony—someone who no longer believes in almost anything.

That drift is proof that the initial subject was larger than a comic strip. Forges started by drawing the antiestéticar of the loan payment and ended up serving as a screen onto which the malaise of a society was projected, a society that discovered, too late, that the joke had consequences.

"We've Lost One of the Greats": Mourning and What Remains

On February 22, 2018, the news broke, and the tone changed. No longer debating if he was better than El Roto: they write to express gratitude. "My grandmother used to say that some people shouldn't die," writes someone who treasures a copy of Los forrenta años (The Forty Years). Others recall the August cartoons, the vacation ones, the ones read with coffee. Some venture that he avoided jail for a joke, and some simply write "RIP" and a line of affection.

There are even those who, in the midst of mourning, maintain that the cartoonist sold out, that his last cartoons were weak, that easy applause got to him. It's the same old discussion with a recently deceased person involved, and it sounds worse. But the dissenter's diagnosis accusing the honoree of having lost his edge is neither new nor exclusive: it's what happens to anyone who draws every day for half a century, that sometimes they hit the mark and sometimes they sign out of routine.

The final tally is given by the years themselves: thousands of strips, an entire country portrayed in pencil, and the hard-to-refute feeling that a guy with a notepad said in a cartoon what economic reports took three years to acknowledge. Little consolation. Now that there are no more cartoons, it turns out we had to read them every morning.

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Disclaimer: This article analyzes the journalistic and economic legacy of graphic humor. Nothing stated herein constitutes investment advice.