Oliver Frey (30 June 1948 - 21 August 2022; Switzerland and UK)
Swiss-born illustrator and comic artist resident in the UK for many years, Frey was a fan of Eagle and Look and Learn as a boy. He studied film at the London School of Film Technique and began drawing comic strips to support himself, working for Fleetway's picture libraries.

After briefly running a film company in Switzerland, Frey returned to the UK and worked as a full-time comic strip artist and illustrator, working on two of his favourite boyhood comic strips, The Trigan Empire (1976-77) in Look and Learn and Dan Dare (1982-83) for the revived Eagle, drawing two episodes of “Return of the Mekon” in 1982, the eight-part story known as “The Timads” in 1983, and a number of one-off Dare stories for various Specials and the 1984 Eagle Annual.

His many credits also included work for the computer magazines CRASH, Zzap!64 (“Terminal Man” (written by Kelvin Gosnell, re-published by Oliver himself in 2010) ) and Amtix, along with art for War Picture Library and FEAR Magazine.

With his brother, Franco, he was a co-founder of Newsfield Publications, providing hundreds of covers and illustrations for their many computer and horror magazines. He later co-founded Thalamus Publishing.

Through the late 1970s and the 1980s Frey was a prolific creator of gay erotic art, usually published under the pen name Zack. These included “Rogue”, a comics series featuring a big, muscular bad-boy hero for HIM Magazine, a monthly gay male pornography publication which he and his partner Roger Kean owned, along with related titles.

Oliver was the artist hired by director Richard Donner to create the comic book art for the black and white opening sequence in Superman: The Movie.