Comic Book Artist #4 Preview

Spanish Gold

The Spanish Invasion An in-depth look at Warren’s Spanish Artists by David A. Roach

Europe

Inset: Map showing the location of the Barcelona school of artists in Catalonia, Spain. There’s got to be something in the water, eh?

In early 1971 fans picking up the latest copy of Vampirella would have had no idea that they were witnessing the start of a revolution. Hidden deep in the pages of Vampirella #11, cover dated May ’71, was a story drawn by the artist Luis Roca which heralded an invasion of artists, not from America, but from Spain. In the magazine’s next issue, readers were greeted by a Sanjulian cover and a “Vampi” strip drawn by José Gonzales and, by #15, it was being drawn entirely by Spaniards. Over the next decade, Warren would come to use 45 different Spanish artists and transform his own fortunes in the process. For a while they also appeared at Marvel, Skywald and Charlton—but it was an invasion that was short-lived and left no lasting mark on American comics, no acolytes to carry on in its tradition. There is a saying that history belongs to the victors, and this is true of an American comics industry built on the success and dominance of super-heroes. On the rare occasion that historians have written about Jim Warren’s line of horror magazines, they have invariably been seen merely as an epilogue to the glory days of EC. The usual story goes something like this: Warren wanted to recreate the old EC horror books and gathered together as many of the original artists as he could find. After a few years of great comics, they all left and the company slid into the doldrums only to be saved by cheap foreign artists from Spain. They could draw pretty pictures but couldn’t tell a story and after a while Warren went under. The End. But the true story of Warren’s great Spanish experience is far more complex than that. It’s a story that has its roots not only in Spain but also in Britain. It’s a story of warring art agencies and it’s the story of a generation of artists that created something unique and then gradually disappeared. Almost all of Warren’s artists came from the city of Barcelona, the capital of the Spanish region of Catalonia, and were mostly born within a few years of each other. As the artist Marcel Miralles puts it: “The biographies of Spanish comics artists are almost always the same: Most are from working class families, and as they say in bullfighting, ‘A hungry bull is the meanest.’

Perhaps this is what leads these kids to get into comics. These artists are self-taught Catalonia, and they usually start Spain working when they are 12 or 13.” Spain in the 1950s was an isolated, repressed country, dominated by one of Europe’s last dictators: Generalissimo Francisco Franco. It had its own comics industry but it was small and woefully underfunded. There was an alternative, however: Britain. Working for British comics they could earn the relatively vast sum of a thousand pesetas a page and it gave them access to the sort of Western consumer lifestyle their fellow countrymen could only dream about—but to explain how the Spanish came to work in Britain, one first needs to

understand the history of British comics themselves. Comic books first appeared in Britain in the 1890s, a good 40 years before America; they were aimed at a young audience and dominated by two publishers, Amalgamated Press (later known as Fleetway) and D.C. Thomson. Up until the Second World War, it was an industry without a significant tradition of adventure comics, rather their strips were either humorous funny animal tales or stories of children that owed their origins more to the book illustrations of the day. In 1940, paper rationing severely curtailed the output of the big two companies, but also allowed a number of smaller, so-called “pirate publishers” to step in, offering gaudy, cheaplyproduced comics to a thrill-starved audience. In the ’30s, American comic books had begun to establish a foothold in Britain but the outbreak of war effectively brought that to a halt, allowing the pirates to step in. With a generation of artists at war, the pirates had to make do with whoever they could find and their resulting efforts were sometimes exciting but more often brash and crude. 1950 was to prove the key year in British comics. It saw the end of paper rationing which heralded an explosion of publishing including the first issues of Cowboy Comics and Schoolfriend from Fleetway, and The Eagle from Hulton Press. The Eagle’s editor was a priest, the Reverend Marcus Morris, who had been so appalled by one of the pirate comics, The Bat (published by Gerald G. Swann), that he became determined to create a more acceptable alternative. The Eagle, with its mixture of full-colour painted strips, informative features, and text stories was an instant success selling 750,000 copies a week. Its main appeal was the science-fiction strip “Dan Dare,” drawn by Frank Hampton and a small army of assistants (including inkers, painters, photographers and prop builders!), which set an almost impossibly high standard for the rest of the industry to follow—but follow they did and as more glossy tabloid-sized comics appeared, so too did artists like Ron Embleton, Don Lawrence, Frank Bellamy and John M. Burns to fill them. Eagle was in many ways the voice of the establishment, resolutely middle-class in its worldview and respectable in every way. So too were rivals like Junior Express, Boys World, Ranger, Look and Learn and T.V.21. Hulton soon expanded its line to include Swift and Robin (for young readers) and Girl (for the burgeoning female market created by the success of Schoolfriend). Fleetway’s Schoolfriend was a comics revival of an earlier story paper (Britain’s rather more genteel equivalent of the American dime novels or pulps) and it was aimed at an early-teens female audience. With sales of a million copies a week, it was the biggest-selling comic in British publishing history and naturally spawned a whole industry of imitators. The typical Schoolfriend story would involve plucky young girls, boarding schools, horses, ballet, and derring-do in endless permutations, a formula seized on by rivals like Girls Crystal, Princess, Diana, Tina and June. Schoolfriend’s format, roughly the same dimensions as a Warren magazine, printed mostly in black-&-white on cheap paper and usually 32 pages long became the industry standard. Boys weeklies like Valiant, Tiger, and Lion soon followed, all containing a mixture of war, suspense, sport, detective, and humor strips and at anytime COMIC BOOK ARTIST

Spring 1999

Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook