EXTRACTS: JOHN STEEL Fleetway Picture Library Classics © 2020 Book Palace Books (272 PAGES in Full edition)

3 JOHN STEEL ™ Although born in Madrid in 1931, Luis Bermejo Rojo’s family soon moved to Albacete. From a very young age Bermejo was actively interested in the world of drawing and painting. He began working professionally in 1947 when he was introduced to Manuel Gago by his school friend Pablo Quesada (who was Gago’s nephew). Gago was the creator of the popular series ‘El Guerrero del Antifaz’ (‘The Masked Warrior’), and through him Bermejo contacted publisher Valenciana, and a year later worked on a similar series to Gago’s, but of unquestionable value, ‘El Rey del Mar’ (‘The Sea King’). At the same time Bermejo was refining his graphic style in short auto-conclusive stories published in the children’s weekly Jaimito . In 1951, Bermejo returned to Madrid, where he took advice, and notable influence from the artist Carlos Saénz de Tejada, who helped him reshape his graphic style towards a more realistic one, while at the same time developing his mastery of the human anatomy, especially on the male figures, along with an unusual treatment of the movement inherited from his initial teacher, Manuel Gago. All this led to his encounter with the emerging editor Manuel Rollán for whom he drew the first 131 booklets of ‘Aventuras del FBI’. His work in the first hundred and one booklets of ‘Adventures of the FBI’ were something memorable, and given Bermejo’s talent for telling thrillers, mixed with action and intrigue, prepared his passage in creating an absolute masterpiece in the Spanish comics industry. But his native land drew him back for various reasons, among them the proximity to his friends Manuel Gago, Miguel and Pedro Quesada, and the brothers José and Leopoldo Ortiz. There he would leave some of his greatest works, after disengaging in 1955 from ‘Adventures of the FBI’, and ending his Madrid career. His first contribution to Maga, the publishing house which the Gago family had created, without being directly owned by Gago himself, was the youthful adventure series, ‘Roque Brío’. But the real huge success prepared by the publishing house was the brilliantly popular ‘Pantera Negra’ (‘Black Panther’, a junglemen story), which was launched in early 1956, with scripts by Pablo Quesada and art by the already masterful José Ortiz. Owed to the many other series Ortiz was working on, he left the pencilling after a dozen booklets to Miguel Quesada, and the inking was shared along with Luis Bermejo on some pages from various episodes. Bermejo, on his part, began working in 1958 on new strip that would bring him his second greatest success after ‘Adventures of the FBI’, the western series ‘Apache’. Bermejo’s artistic career in Britain began in the late 1950s through the Belgian agency A.L.I., when he worked in the titles Girls Crystal and Tarzan Weekly . Later, through an art agency in Barcelona, Bardon Art, Bermejo worked for Fleetway on their pocket-size comic series Thriller Picture Library , War and Battle Picture Libraries , and ‘Pike Mason’ for Boys’ World in the early 1960s. Like many other European artists who had never been to England, Bermejo relied on by then recent photographs taken of London by another colleague of the agency he worked for, which is why his stories for John Steel, for example, look so realistic and set on the ongoing swinging sixties’ London. In 1962 he started drawing the war-themed comic strip Mann of Battle for Eagle , and would take over the strip ‘Heros the Spartan’ from Frank Bellamy in 1963, with an assist on the art by Matías Alonso. Later he would also draw the superhero series ‘Johnny Future’. For the British market, Bermejo worked out of a studio in Valencia, which he shared with other artists including José Ortiz, Miguel Quesada, and Emilio Frego. These artists, including Bermejo, worked also through the Italian agent Piero Dami in 1968, where LUIS BERMEJO