Manuel Benet Blanes (born 1946; Valencia, Spain)
Manuel Benet is a comics artist who has worked for Commando and the Judge Dredd Megazine, amongst other titles. In 2019, he drew the first Lord Peter Flint story to see print in over thirty years in Commando #5255.

Manuel Benet Blanes was born in Valencia. During the 1960s and 1970s, he studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in San Carlos, the Escuela de Maestría Industrial and at the Academia de Pintura Vicente Barreira.

As a comic book artist he began his long association with The Bardon Agency and has drawn for several foreign publishers, including DC Thomson (Scotland), Fleetway (England), Bastei (Germany), Anaya (Spain), Semic Press (Sweden) and Universo (Italy), as well as the British daily The Sun.

Apart from the comic book, throughout his professional career he has played various formats, such as portraiture and watercolor, in all of them with excellent results, product of his mastery of drawing. As in painting, Benet has always been in favour of drawing the natural, to the point of considering it an essential requirement, since this allows him to have direct access to the scene, the person, and the colors present.

Over the last decade the artist has been focusing on what has always been his greatest passion, and which allows him greater creativity and freedom: painting. Proof of this are the multiple exhibitions that he makes annually throughout the Spanish geography, and the awards he has obtained in the painting contests to which he has presented himself. Although the theme of his paintings is very varied, and touches on both the Mediterranean and the marine landscape, the figures or the still lifes, lately he is more focused on dead nature, achieving as few artists than the beauty of the daily utensils and crystals are transferred to his paintings. True to his principles, Benet never makes copies of originals or paints photography, but prefers that it be his eyes that dictate the colors to be dictated to him than to capture on the canvas.

Also a fine artist, he has exhibited his work in galleries since 1976.
Source: Illustration Art Gallery