EXTRACTS: Warren magazines - The Spanish Artists (Illustrators Special Edition) © 2016 The Book Palace (144 PAGES in Full edition)

74 José Gonzalez Discover how a love of drawing beautiful women transformed a young street urchin into the foremost delineator of the most iconic female in comics history. José González Navarro was born in Barcelona in 1939 and lived all his life in the Chinese Quarter of the city, perhaps the poorest section in town. Growing up within an impoverished family with only a widowed mother who’d lost her husband during the Spanish Civil War wasn’t the ideal circumstances for an only child. The chances life had reserved for a child such as Pepe, were not too propitious. A minimum amount of education and living in poverty left him but two choices: either get a badly paid job or hit the streets from the slums and become a delinquent. Fortunately for a child whom society had denied most privileges, Pepe was born with a natural talent: he could draw on paper everything he saw around him. And he could do so without any schooling and an almost ingrained spontaneity. At a very early age Pepe discovered his talent for drawing and would use his mother’s movie-star magazines as source