José Cabrero Arnal

Who was José Cabrero Arnal?

José Cabrero Arnal or C. Arnal was a Catalan-Spanish cartoonist, who became a naturalized French citizen.

During his youth in Barcelona he worked as cabinetmaker and as repairman of calculators. He published his very first graphic works in magazines like Pocholo or the famous TBO, with a character called Top, a humanized dog that later became the famous Pif le chien.

In 1936, after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he enrolled in the Republican militia and was forced into exile in France after the end of war. In 1940, while his adoptive country was under German occupation, he was captured and deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp, as were many other Republican exiles. He would not leave until the end of World War II, in 1945.

In 1946 he published the first cartoons of Placid et Muzo, an anthropomorphic fox and bear, in the weekly publication Vaillant, le journal de Pif. He was a frequent collaborator of L'Humanité, the newspaper of the French Communist Party.