EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 22 © 2018 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

19 An Art Agency in London and Barcelona The art agency began on a chance encounter between Barry Coker and Spanish artist Jordi Macabich, who was looking for work in the UK In Europe, the decade of the 1950s became an era when comic books began to grow as an industry with countless series and magazines. In Britain it flourished to the point where they didn’t have enough artists to fill their quota for their comic books, to the point where they relied on art agencies (usually featuring foreign artists) to provide enough artistic talent to fill the demand. At the time in Spain, with their various comics magazines andweekly eight-page booklets, their industry was also developing. Earlier in 1945, Bruguera, at the time Spain’s largest publishing house of comicmagazines, had created the art agency Creaciones Editoriales with the sole purpose of selling gag cartoons and comic strips around various other European countries. Spanish artist Francisco Hidalgo, recently established in France in the ’50s, got so many assignments that he asked fellow Spaniard artist Josep Toutain to help him find other artists to keep up with the heavy demand. Toutain even joined forces with Antonio Ayné, a publisher and co- owner of Editorial Toray, to look for work in the foreign ABOVE: Untitled watercolour by Víctor Ibañez, an artist who specialized in war stories. This painting is reminiscent of many of the illustrations done for US pulp magazines.