Alessandro Biffignandi (8 October 1935 – 22 January 2017) was an Italian

illustrator An illustrator is an artist who specializes in enhancing writing or elucidating concepts by providing a visual representation that corresponds to the content of the associated text or idea. The illustration may be intended to clarify complicat ...

, mostly known for his covers for

digest-sized Digest size is a magazine size, smaller than a conventional or "journal size" magazine but larger than a standard paperback book, approximately , but can also be and , similar to the size of a DVD case. These sizes have evolved from the printin ...

, adult

comics a medium used to express ideas with images, often combined with text or other visual information. It typically the form of a sequence of panels of images. Textual devices such as speech balloons, captions, and onomatopoeia can indicate ...

whose themes were

sex Sex is the trait that determines whether a sexually reproducing animal or plant produces male or female gametes. Male plants and animals produce smaller mobile gametes (spermatozoa, sperm, pollen), while females produce larger ones (ova, oft ...

violence Violence is the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy. Other definitions are also used, such as the World Health Organization's definition of violence as "the intentional use of physical force or Power (social and p ...

, and horror.

Biography

Alessandro Biffignandi was born in 1935 in

Rome , established_title = Founded , established_date = 753 BC , founder = King Romulus (legendary) , image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg , map_caption ...

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical re ...

. As a child, he was a comics fan, reading titles such as ''

Topolino ''Topolino'' (from the Italian name for Mickey Mouse) is an Italian digest-sized comic series featuring Disney comics. The series has had a long running history, first appearing in 1932 as a comics magazine. It is currently published by Panini ...

'', an Italian,

comic series featuring

Disney comics Disney comics are comic books and comic strips featuring characters created by the Walt Disney Company, including Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge. The first Disney comics were newspaper strips appearing from 1930 on, starting with ...

, and subsequently getting interested in their drawings. In 1954, he was accepted as a student in the studio of Averardo Ciriello, a

movie theater A movie theater (American English), cinema (British English), or cinema hall ( Indian English), also known as a movie house, picture house, the movies, the pictures, picture theater, the silver screen, the big screen, or simply theater is a ...

billboard A billboard (also called a hoarding in the UK and many other parts of the world) is a large outdoor advertising structure (a billing board), typically found in high-traffic areas such as alongside busy roads. Billboards present large advertise ...

designer. After moving on to work for a while for the brothers Enzo and Giuliano Nistri, who also produced movie theater advertising, Biffignandi was hired by the studio of Augusto Favalli, at the time Italy's biggest producer of

movie poster A film poster is a poster used to promote and advertise a film primarily to persuade paying customers into a theater to see it. Studios often print several posters that vary in size and content for various domestic and international markets. The ...

s. In 1958Dan Dare, pilot of the future
website (or 1960),

Lambiek Galerie Lambiek is a Dutch comic book store and art gallery in Amsterdam, founded on November 8, 1968 by Kees Kousemaker (, – Bussum, ), though since 2007, his son Boris Kousemaker is the current owner. From 1968 to 2015, it was located ...

website Biffignandi moved to

Milan Milan ( , , Lombard: ; it, Milano ) is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of about 1.4 million, while its metropolitan city h ...

and joined the art agency of Rinaldo Dami (aka Roy D'Ami), which was producing

comic strip A comic strip is a sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st ...

s for the

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English, ...

market on assignment from

Fleetway Fleetway Publications was a magazine publishing company based in London. It was founded in 1959 when the Mirror Group acquired the Amalgamated Press, then based at Fleetway House, Farringdon Street, London. It was one of the companies that merg ...

DC Thomson DC Thomson is a media company based in Dundee, Scotland. Founded by David Couper Thomson in 1905, it is best known for publishing ''The Dundee Courier'', ''The Evening Telegraph'' and ''The Sunday Post'' newspapers, and the comics ''Oor Wull ...

, and others. By the early 1970s, the popularity in Italy of the

'' fumetti'' comics whose themes were mostly sex, violence, and horror, was at its peak.Castaldi, Simone. ''Drawn and Dangerous: Italian Comics of the 1970s and 1980s''; University Press of Mississippi; 2012; Biffignandi started doing covers for

Renzo Barbieri Renzo Barbieri (10 March 1940 – 23 September 2007) was an author and editor of Italian comics as well as the founder of the publishing house Edifumetto. In 1980 he wrote ''Il Manuale del Playboy'' (Manual for Playboys), a textbook about wher ...

, the founder and owner of ''

Edifumetto Edifumetto was an Italian publishing house of comics, founded by Renzo Barbieri. It was started in 1972 and folded in 1993. The majority of their publications were digest- or pocket-sized adult comics known in Italy as '' fumetti''. Popularity peak ...

'', the highly successful publisher of ''fumetti'', where he was eventually drawing between ten and twenty paintings every month, creating overall hundreds of covers. From 1984 onwards, Biffignandi concentrated on magazine and book covers and illustrations, also doing

oil painting Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on wood panel or canvas for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest of ...

s on commission. He died on 22 January 2017,Alessandro Biffignandi R.I.P. (1935-2017)
, ''Comic Art Fans'', 22 January 2017 a few months after

Korero Press Korero Press is a London-based art book publisher. Its list of books mainly includes pop culture, street art, erotica and horror titles. It has published books by contemporary artists Ron English, Patrick J. Jones and Graham Humphreys. Korero Pr ...

published a retrospective of his life's work.

Notes

External links

Sample of works by Alessandro Biffignandi
on

Tumblr Tumblr (stylized as tumblr; pronounced "tumbler") is an American microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a sho ...

Spaghettifumetti
{{DEFAULTSORT:Biffignandi, Alessandro Italian illustrators 1935 births 2017 deaths

Biography

See also

Notes

External links