Alberto Breccia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alberto Breccia (15 April 1919 - November 10, 1993) was an Argentine comic book creator.

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, Breccia moved with his parents to Buenos Aires, Argentina when he was three years old. After leaving school Breccia worked in a tripe packing plant and in 1938 he got a job for the magazine El Resero, where he wrote articles and drew the covers.

He began to work professionally in 1939, when he joined the publishing house Manuel Láinez. He worked on magazines such as Tit-Bits, Rataplán and El Gorrión where he created comic strips such Mariquita Terremoto, Kid Río Grande and El Vengador (based on a popular novel) and adaptations.

During the 1950s he became an "honorary" member of the Group of Venice that comprised of expatriate Italian artists like Hugo Pratt, Ido Pavone, Horacio Lalia, Faustinelli and Ongaro as well as other honorary members such as Solano Lopez, Carlo Cruz and Arturo Perez del Castillo. With Hugo Pratt, he started the Pan-American School of Art in Buenos Aires. In 1957 he joined Editorial Frontera, under the direction of Héctor Oesterheld, where he created several stories of Ernie Pike. In 1958 Breccia's series Sherlock Time began in the comic Hora Cero Extra, with scripts by Oesterheld.

In 1960 he began to work for European publishers via a Buenos Aries based art agency: for the Fleetway publishing house of England he drew a few westerns and war stories. This period did not last long. (His son Enrique Breccia would also draw a few war stories for Fleetway in the late 1960s: i.e. Spy 13')

He met with Oesterheld in 1962 to produce one of the most important comic strips of history: Mort Cinder, in which the face of the antique dealer Ezra Winston, companion of the inmortal Mort Cinder, is actually Alberto Breccia's own, and that of his protagonist the one of his friend and assistant, Horacio Lalia. Cinder and Winston's strip began on July 26, 1962, in Nº 714 of the Misterix magazine, and ran until 1964.

In 1968 Breccia was joined by his son, Enrique, in a project to draw the comic biography of Che, the life of Che Guevara, again with a script provided by Oesterheld. This comic book is considered by many people as one of its masterpieces.

In 1969 Oesterheld rewrote the script of El Eternauta, for the Argentinian magazine Gente. Breccia drew the story with a decidedly experimental style, resorting to diverse techniques to obtain a work that was anything but conventional and moving away from the commercial. Breccia refused to modify its style, which added to the tone of the script, and was much different from Francisco Solano López original.

His other stories include: Cthulhu Mythos, A certain Daneri (text by Carlos Trillo), a Historia grafica del Chile and Perramus, inspired by the work of the poet Juan Sasturain.

Alberto Breccia died in Buenos Aires in 1993.