13, Rue del Percebe

"13, Rue del Percebe" (13, Barnacle Street) is a Spanish comic book created by Francisco Ibáñez that debuted in the pages of "Tío Vivo" magazine on March 6, 1961 and quickly became highly popular.

"13, Rue del Percebe" is a single panel that takes up the whole page that represents an humorous view of a building and the people who inhabits it. Each apartment is a panel in itself, with fixed characters with defined personalities. Usually each panel is not related to the others and can be read in any order, but sometimes an event affects more than one neighbor, and read in order the comic effect is more pronounced.

The inhabitants

The flat roof is inhabited by a debtor that is always imagining ingenious ways to evade his creditors, and by a poor black cat that is always been tortured by a cruelly ingenious mouse.

The third floor is inhabited by a clumsy thief who's always stealing useless things and his long-suffering wife. Next door, there are a family with three mischievous young boys.

In the second floor, they live an elderly woman that's always having trouble with the animals she buys or adopts (usually dogs, but she also had others, including a whale), and a hopeless tailor with a lot of nerve (before this, a crazy scientist lived there with his monster, in an obvious parody of the monster of Frankenstein).

In the first floor dwell an incompetent veterinarian and an overcrowded guesthouse run by a stingy woman.

In the ground, there's a grocery run by Mr. Senén, a distrustful and stingy man who's always cheating on his clients with the weight of products (though sometimes he gets his comeuppance). At his side, there's the porter's lodge with its gossiping porter. Mr. Hurón lives in the sewer's entrance in front of the building, and is often seen chatting with the porter.

Lastly, there's the elevator. Through inanimate, the elevator's troubles are a running gag on the strip. Either it does not work properly, it's stolen, removed for repairs (and replaced with alternative elevation methods like a cannon or a bellow), or replaced by newer versions commissioned to a mixed list of builders (like a maker of chess pieces or a glassworker).

Sometimes, another of Ibañez characters, Rompetechos, also visits the building.

Other media

Some of the characters from this strip appear in the movie "La gran aventura de Mortadelo y Filemón", based on Ibañez's most well-known characters, Mortadelo y Filemón. In the movie, Filemón's mother lives in 13, Rue del Percebe and her neighbors are the strip characters.

This strip was also the inspiration for the successful TV series "Aquí no hay quien viva".