Two Spanish comedians won the comic book world championship with a cartoon of Pope Francis and Maradona.

In the first panel , Pope Francis runs among the clouds, imagining his encounter with God . He has just died and is arriving in paradise. In the second panel , the Argentine pontiff has indeed arrived in heaven and is embracing God, only this time God is Diego Armando Maradona. The comic strip makes perfect sense if you consider it on the page of an Argentine media outlet, but it was published on April 24th of this year in La Voz de Galicia , one of the most important newspapers in that Spanish autonomous region, and has just won one of the World Press Cartoon awards , the most prestigious cartoon competition in the world.

The daily strip appears under the signature Pinto & Chinto , behind which is a duo that has been working together for twenty years to create humor and is made up of the cartoonist and illustrator David Pintor (born in A Coruña in 1975) and the screenwriter and writer Carlos López (born in Boimorto in 1967), who not only publish in the press, but also create stories, comics and illustrated albums for all ages.

“We received the award with great joy. For us, it is a true honor and a real recognition of our work , because these awards are the equivalent of the Oscars for graphic humor and press cartoons,” they told the press.

"After the Pope's death , we wanted to create a heartfelt piece ," Carlos López tells Clarín from Galicia, "and we came up with the idea of ​​the Pope arriving in heaven in the first panel. When the reader thinks he's running to embrace God... well, the Pope, before being Pope, is Argentinian, and for an Argentinian, Maradona is also a god , as reflected in the second panel, when they both embrace. We think it turned out to be funny and, as I say, heartfelt, a way to pay him tribute."

World Press Cartoon is an independent organization based in Lisbon, Portugal, that has been organizing one of the world's largest and most prestigious annual press cartoon competitions for twenty years . In addition, the organization presents independent exhibitions dedicated to topics such as gender violence and environmental protection, and works to guarantee press freedom for illustrators worldwide.

Carlos López doesn't remember if that piece dedicated to Pope Francis came about on the first try or if there was a collaborative process of developing ideas. "Sometimes the strips come out on the first try and with the first idea, while many other times we have to make several sketches , discard the first attempts, and, through consensus, find a final solution," he adds about his working method.

This year, the first prize in the Editorial Cartoon category was won by Montenegrin Darko Drljevic with an illustration showing the head of the Statue of Liberty with its mouth sewn shut with Donald Trump's signature.

López is a writer and cartoonist, although he trained at the Higher School of Architecture between 1993 and 2000. " It's not easy to publish a daily comic strip. Current political events don't always provide us with material, as some days are rather uneventful. But, well, we rely on our craft and always find something to write about," López tells Clarín .

If he has to imagine other Argentinians who could star in his work, the names of Leo Messi immediately come to mind. “I can also think of the writers Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, so admired, and actors like Ricardo Darín or Federico Luppi. And Les Luthiers ,” he lists. He also mentions that Argentina’s presence in Galicia “is extremely important , a relationship between sister countries. Here, Argentina is called the fifth Galician province because of the number of Galicians who emigrated there and formed such a large and important community.”

Pinto & Chinto gained popularity through the press and went on to publish books. They have already published more than twenty, and their work has been recognized with numerous awards in Italy, Colombia, France, Mexico, and many Spanish cities. Among their accolades, they won the Mingote Prize in 2013 and have exhibited their work in countless cities across Spain, such as A Coruña, Ourense, El Ferrol, León, and Madrid, as well as in countries like Japan, Germany, Mexico, and Italy.

In addition to publishing in La Voz de Galicia, his cartoons appeared in media outlets such as Diario 16, La Voz de Baleares, O Correo Galego, The Wall Street Journal and Diario de León, among others.

Carlos López says there is a universal humor: "It's the kind that affects us all. But there is also, obviously, a local humor. In Galicia, we have a humor that some find similar to British and Irish humor. It's a specific humor with its own personality, which includes a defense mechanism against adversity. We call it 'retranca,' and it's a word that's difficult to translate, close to irony, but it hides what it really means in a very strange way, which is a bit disconcerting for foreigners."

The cartoon that brings together Pope Francis and Maradona displays some of that universal humor and, why not, a little bit of irony by replacing God with D10s.