Extracts: JET-ACE LOGAN Fleetway Picture Library Classics © 2019 Book Palace Books (272 PAGES in Full edition)

5 ™ I first came across the work of Kurt Caesar in the summer of 1977 in the pages of the Space Picture Library Holiday Special which reprinted a couple of his early 60s Jet-Ace Logan strips, though typically there was no indication in the comic of exactly who this artist was. There was no doubting the quality of the art though, it was stunning, and astonishingly realistic, particularly anything mechanical. Above all, this was an artist who was spectacularly good at drawing “things”, rockets, landscapes, cars, helicopters, buildings, you name it, he could draw it, and draw it in a way that looked compellingly real. He had a way of packing his panels with tiny dots and lines while also leaving off edges to create an almost photographic effect. But who on earth was this artist? Kurt Caesar was an artist with many names, identities and lives, who worked extensively in two distinct genres; Science Fiction and war. Caesar was born Kurt Kaiser in 1906 to German parents in the French town of Montigny Lorraine, then part of the German Empire. After initially working as a journalist he moved to his wife’s home country of Italy in the ‘30s where he began a career as a comic artist. At some point he changed his name to the more Italian sounding Kurt Caesar, though much of his early comic work was signed Caesar Avai or Corrado Caesar for reasons that remain somewhat oblique. Italian comics were beginning to flourish in the 30s with weekly titles mixing American and British imports with home-grown Italian strips, often crafted with immense skill and technical expertise. Early Italian masters such as Walter Molino, Franco Caprioli, Rino Albertarelli and Federico Pedrocchi were often the equal of their American counterparts and Caesar was very much a key part of this early comics renaissance. Exactly what grounding in art the young Caesar had is unclear, but he seems to have come into comics fully formed, with highly accomplished artwork that looked essentially the same as it would throughout the ensuing decades. Caesar’s first published strip appeared in L’Intropedo in 1935, quickly followed by a three year spell drawing for La Risata where he drew Itamburini D’Africa and Cristoforo Colombo, among other series. In 1938 he started a lengthy association with the Disney title Topolino , though his strips Il Mistero Dell’Aeropto Di Z and Il Mozzo Del Sommergibile were high octane adventure, rather than funny animals. He was also active in L’Audace but his most important and controversial work was created for the Catholic weekly Il Vittorioso which he joined in 1938 and where he created the notorious Romano Il Legionario. Romano was a daredevil pilot in the Italian air force, but what makes his early adventures so startling to contemporary readers is that he was an enthusiastic fascist, fighting on behalf of Franco in the Spanish Civil War. His duty done Romano duly returned to Italy but soon enough he was back in the air fighting for his homeland in the Second World War in strips dripping with fascistic dogma and sloganeering. Caesar’s Romano strips continued to appear until 1943 (along with the self-explanatory Aviazione E Fascismo in L’Audace ), but evidently at some point he took a more active role in the conflict, serving with Rommel’s Afrika Corps as a translator where he was eventually captured by the British. Even on the front line he drew obsessively, sending back incredibly detailed, realistic pencil drawings of the war around him. A friend of mine once said of his fellow Italians that there were 3 million fascists in 1944 and 3000 in 1945, with the country choosing a kind of mass amnesia over the kind of guilt and soul searching that usually went with a shameful past. Caeasr’s career picked up again in 1947, presumably after a spell in British confinement, exactly where he left it, drawing strips for Il Vittorioso , though these were less controversial KURT CAESAR

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