Lamarque, Abril

Eduardo Abril Lamarque was born in Cuba on August 28, 1904. His parents sent him to the United States in 1916 when he was twelve to study English and business administration. He lived with an American family in Brooklyn. Lamarque's first cartoon was published in the Boy Scout section of the New York World-Telegram and Evening Mail at age 15. Four years later he created Bla-Bla, a comic strip that appeared regularly in the New York Daily News . He is credited with creating, in the early 1920s, the first Spanish language comic strip that was not translated from English. The title cartoon character, Monguito, was a hapless soul, fully dressed in business suit and hat, who kept getting into sticky situations. Lamarque produced hundreds of these strips which were picked up by the New York based United Feature Syndicate and published daily in Spanish language newspapers throughout Latin America and the United States.

When he was twenty, Lamarque returned to Cuba and worked as the artistic director for the Havana newspaper Lunes de Diario de Cuba . He also published a booklet designed to teach the elements of caricature drawing. Lamarque returned to New York and was hired by the New York World Telegram and Evening Mail as a caricaturist. In this position, he produced political cartoons and caricatures for the paper, introducing his "radiocatures", which involved providing instructions on the radio for filling in a grid in the newspaper to produce a caricature of well-known figure in the news.

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