EXTRACTS: Pirates! Illustrators Special Edition © 2020 The Book Palace (128 PAGES in Full edition)

127 Rico Tomaso (1898-1985). In his youth, Tomaso played piano in a dance orchestra where he met drummer Dean Cornwell, who also became a famous illustrator andwouldbeoneof his art teachers (and artistic influence). He contributed to such periodicals as Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post . N. C. Wyeth (1882-1945). Another pupil of Pyle’s who achieved even greater notoriety than his teacher. Created more than 1,000 paintings and illustrated 112 books. His version of Robert L. Steven‐ son’s ‘Treasure Island’ is considered hismasterpiece. Severino Baraldi (1930-). An Italian artist who has illustratedmore than 240 volumes for publishers both in Italy and other foreign countries. He collaborated for the British weekly educational magazine Look and Learn for seven years, and for fifteen years did the illustrations for the ‘Facts of theDay’ page of the journal Famiglia Cristiana ( Christian Family ). Oliver Frey (1948). Born in Switzerland, when he was eight his familymoved toEnglandwherehediscovered ‘DanDare’ in Eagle . A fanof the three Franks—Hampson,Humphris andBellamy—Frey dreamed of working for Eagle but instead got a response fromDon Lawrence at Look and Learn, from whom he would later take over the ‘Trigan Empire’ strip. He also worked for Fleetway’s War Picture Library doing both covers and interior stories. For CRASH magazine he created his own series, ‘The Terminal Man’, and has also worked in the digital domain. FortuninoMatania (1881-1963). Italian artist noted for his realistic portrayal of WorldWar I trench warfare and a wide range of histor‐ ical subjects. In 1904 he joined the staff The Sphere , a British newspaper, where some of his most famous work was to appear including his illustrations for the sinking of the Titanic . At the outbreakof theFirstWorldWar hebecame awar artist. After thewar he switched to scenes of ancient high life, generally including one or two nudes in every picture, “because the public demanded it.” Towards the end of his life he illustrated fe atures for the educational Britishweekly Look and Learn . Syd Nicholls (1896-1977). Tasmanian-born Syd Wentworth Nicholls worked on art-title designs before becoming senior staff artist for the Sydney Evening News in 1923. It was for this paper that Nicholls produced a colour humorous strip, ‘Fatty Finn’, which was acclaimed as among the very best of all Australian strips and ran in syndication right up until his death in 1977. For some time Nicholls triedwithout success to finda publisher for his pirate adventure strip, ‘Middy Malone’. Then, in 1931, when he was inexplicably sacked, Nicholls decided to publish his own comic books and, later in the same decade, the adventures of ‘Middy Malone’ at last hit the news‐ stands, becoming one of themost popular pirate comics of all time. AlexNiño (1940-). Born in the Philippines, Niño, likemost Filipino artists, beganworking forDCcomics in the early ’70s drawingmany horror stories. He also worked on some jungle series and drew the pirate series ‘Captain Fear’. For Marvel he worked on ‘Sword of Conan’, but it was his surrealistic drawings for the black and white Warren magazines that put him on the map as one of the weirdest artists around, which, in turn, led him to work for the colour adult- fantasy slick magazine Heavy Metal . Besides his work in comics, Niño alsoworked for theWalt Disney studios on the animated films ‘Atlantis: The Lost Empire’ (2001), and ‘Treasure Planet’ (2002), a sci- fi version of R. L. Stevenson’s ‘Treasure Island’. He is now retired but teaches art classes once a year in the Philippines. José Luis Salinas (1908-1985). Argentinean comic artist who created his first strip ‘Hernan the Corsair’ in 1936 for the children’s weekly magazine Patoruzú . After the success of this pirate serial, Salinas went on to draw strip adaptations of classic tales such as ‘The Last of the Mohicans’, ‘The Jungle Book’, ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’, ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ and ‘The Three Musketeers’. He always said that one day hewouldworkon a comic strip for theAmericannews‐ papers, which he eventually did in 1951, when he began drawing his most popular strip, ‘The Cisco Kid’, for King Features Syndicate, ending after a 17-year run in 1968. A year later he contributed some beautifully painted strips to the U.K. weekly, Tell Me Why . His last work, a fully-painted graphic novel titled ‘The Battle of Vittoria’, was later finished by Spanish artist AdolfoUsero after Salinas’ death. Image courtesy of Heritage Auctions