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

FLEETWAY PICTURE LIBRARY ™ CLA SS IC S 4 they would do many paintings for books and magazines. During this period Bermejo would also do a number of illustrations for the British children’s magazines Tell Me Why , Once Upon a Time , Look and Learn and Tiny Tots . In 1974, Josep Toutain, through his Barcelona art agency Selecciones Ilustradas, went in search of new artists to export to the American comics. A few months later he called on Bermejo, a solid professional, to take charge, along with other artists on the first line, such as Brocal Remohi, Luis García, José Ortiz, Esteban Maroto, José María Beá and Leopoldo Sánchez, to nourish the demand for black and white comics of horror and fantasy for New York editor James Warren’s publications: Creepy , Eerie and Vampirella . Among the many stories Bermejo did for Warren, were some adaptations of stories by Edgar A. Poe and co-creating the time-travelling series The Rook , one of his longest and last jobs he did for the famous publisher. In 1983 he collaborated in the ephemeral self-managed publishing project Metropol created in Barcelona by a group of artists/ authors: Leopoldo Sánchez, Manfred Sommer, José Ortiz, together with the writer Antonio Segura. Metropol was an adult-oriented magazine featuring stories taking place inside the fictional city of Metropol. During the decade of the 1980s he also worked for other Spanish comic magazines such as Cimoc , where he created the interesting science-fiction series ‘Orka’ (1982) and the Foreign Legion series ‘Diario de Arena’ (1984), and for 1984 , an adult fantasy monthly magazine published by Toutain, and through a proposal by American writer Rich Margopoulos, drew the very interesting ‘The Space Beagle Voyage’ series (1983). At the end of the ’80s he would take over, renew and update, the adventures of ‘El Capitán Trueno’, perhaps one of the most popular comic strips in Spain, created originally in the 1950s by writer Victor Mora and artist Ambrós. By the turn of the century he retired from the comics industry and took up painting in watercolours until his death in December 2015. Diego Cordoba July 2019