EXTRACTS: British War Comics Illustrators Special © 2018 The Book Palace (144 PAGES in Full edition)

10 A n extrovert and fiery character , Rinaldo Dami was born in Cismon del Grappa, Italy in 1923. He served in the Air Force during the Second World War, but was taken prisoner by the British Army on the North African front. It was during his incarceration that he learned to speak English and served as an interpreter. It was also as a prisoner of war that he discovered American comic strips and artists such as Milton Caniff, Frank Robbins and Alex Toth, which would be a source of inspiration for Dami whose love of drawing had been evident since his boyhood. Once the war was over, Dami became part of the animation studio run by Nino Pagot, where he worked on the film I Fratelli Dinamite ( The Dynamite Brothers ) in 1947. In 1948 he made the move from animation to comic strips, working for the publishing firm, Cremona Nuova , where he drew the series Bleck & Gionni , Dixy Scott , and Il Piccolo Sergente ( The Young Sergeant ) in a style close to Caniff ’s. He also began to sign his work as RoyDami, in line withmany Italian artists picking amore Anglo-sounding name to compete with the American comic-strip creators. In that same year he first began Roy Dami and Studio Creazioni Dam i How an ex POW founded an illustration agency that went to war for twenty years. ABOVE: Detail from a cover for Il Sergente York . Roy Dami's early comics work was both thematically and stylistically influenced by U.S. comics. FACING PAGE: Dami's cover to the debut issue of Pampa , another western series heavily influenced by the work of Caniff and Robbins.