The flying cups

The flying cups is a comic strip published between 1988 and 1989 by the Spanish authors Francisco Ibáñez and Juan Manuel Muñoz belonging to the series Mortadelo y Filemón, where once again the extraterrestrial threat looms over the planet.

Synopsis

Some aliens intend to dominate the Earth, and, according to the P.A.S.A., their main objective is the T.I.A., the organization that ensures world order. To do this, they fly in flying cups, similar to ordinary coffee cups, and attack the first unsuspecting person. Its bite alters the victim's personality, increasing their manias and abilities to turn them against others. Mortadelo and Filemón must destroy all the worms and return any affected person to normal.

In the first chapter Mortadelo and Filemón destroy the alien, which is a toothy worm - that's how they all are. However the following chapters focus on the healing of the victims. In the last one they will face the leader, who has nothing to do with his peers in size.

Mortadelo and Filemón discover at the beginning that electric shocks work (it occurs to Mortadelo because, he says, he read that an electric shock could make Quasimodo handsome). Attempts to impose a shock of volts on victims are absurd.

Comments

If Ibáñez parodied the famous series in The Invaders, now it is Earth against the flying saucers. In both cases it is only about the title: Ibáñez does not intend to cover existing classics, but rather to wink at them in stories invented by him, with his ingenuity and good humor.

Criticism

Soto puts these comics in the group of those that "hit rock bottom with painful drawings and innocuous scripts."