EXTRACTS: AIR WAR STORIES Fleetway Picture Library Classics © 2019 Book Palace Books (272 PAGES in Full edition)

Introduction 3 airwar stories Born in Milan in 1922, Ferdinando Tacconi was always passionate about drawing. He cultivated this passion by attending the Milan School of Applied Arts and, later, the Brera Fine Arts School where he took lessons with a nude model. In 1942 he was drafted and served in the war where he worked as a wireless operator for the Italian Air Force. After the conflict, and finished his military service, in 1946, he began working for Mondadori, as an illustrator for women’s magazines such as Confidenze di Liala and Grazia . Later, in 1947, he came into contact with the publisher Pasquale Giurleo who introduced him to the world of comics. For Giurleo, Tacconi drew ‘Morgan the Pirate’, ‘Miss Diavolo’ and ‘Jack il Piloto’. He then went on to work for Torelli, collaborating with Paludetti on the creation of ‘Sciusià’ (Italian pronunciation for the word ‘shoeshine’ which Italian boys had heard the GIs stationed over there ask them), and then working on ‘Nat del Santa Cruz’. At the same time he drew the covers for different books of the same publisher. In 1955 the great adventure with the English market finally began. Tacconi was confronted with a completely different way of working, a greater value recognised in comics, longer and less stressed times for the realisation of stories, and a demand by the publishers for extreme accuracy and attention to details. Like other Italian artists, he found a place in the English market working for the Junior Express (a children’s supplement to the Daily Express ) drawing a science-fiction series ‘Journey into Space’, written by Charles Chilton, and then moved on to his real love, drawing war stories for Fleetway, especially stories concerning aviation. For the realisation of these stories he moved several times, for short periods, to England. It was a very lively period in which he produced an impressive amount of material, increasingly refining his very personal graphic style. He also did fully painted work for the educational magazine Look and Learn . When, in the seventies, he returned to work for the Italian market, he first devoted himself to illustrating educational texts (similar to the experience he had in England with Look and Learn ), and almost immediately returned to comics, working for one of the most active and popular publisher of that period, Renzo Barbieri, pioneer of the erotic and, later, pornographic comics. For Edifumetto, Barbieri’s publishing house, Tacconi did many covers for a large number of their series (about scandalous loves, forbidden current affairs, forbidden TV films, just to name a few) and drew some episodes of the ‘Red Baron’, an erotic series taking place during the First World War’s first air-battle encounters. He also did covers for other publishers too; among the most important characters he worked on were Jacula (a female Dracula), Lucrezia and Zora the Vampire , all comics that were explicitly erotic and aimed for adults. Tacconi moved away from this kind of publications when they became more sexually explicit and would eventually turn into pornographic comics. In the late ’70s, and along with a series of renowned European artists, he worked for French publisher Larousse on the educational comic series: ‘L’Histoire de France’, ‘L’Histoire du Far West’ and ‘Les Grandes Découvertes’. After his experience with Barbieri, and together with writer Alfredo Castelli, he realised his most famous work: ‘Gli Aristocratici’ (‘The Aristocrats’), a series about a band of gentlemen thieves. The strip series was created for the Italian Catholic boys’ newspaper Corriere dei Ragazzi . The series met great success in Germany where it was continued in the German magazine Zack! . Ferdinando Tacconi