EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 22 © 2018 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

21 been a waiter or something in Soho. He spoke quite good English, and he was very astute. So he came over and started to represent Macabich… and Macabich was also very astute—as Catalans tend to be! Then he came over on a motorbike with his wife, up through Belgium. But really it was to cut out the middle man. Which it did!” In 1957, with the large number of assignments he was getting from the UK and Belgium, Macabich, along with Barry Coker, decided to create the art agency Bardon Art, with an office in London and another in Spain (the name coming from ‘Bar’ for Barcelona, and ‘don’ for London; “It sounded good,” Macabich said). Along with other artists, Macabich began collaborating mainly on western strips, but running the agency simultaneously soon took its toll, and Macabich eventually abandoned his drawing career and became an art director instead. Macabich was an excellent and honest professional, an extrovert person with an enormous vitality, who along with his associate Barry Coker, got Bardon Art on many different fronts, not only within the British market but all over Europe as well. In France they worked for the agency Lug and for publishers such as Imperia andAredit. Macabich even came up with the idea of publishing daily strips in a vertical format for the French newspapers. For the Scandinavian market they worked on Disney material, and at one time even handled the rights to the Italian character Topo Gigio . All the material they did for IPC/Fleetway with the Spanish artists was later handled by Macabich in Spain, who sold many of the series to Bruguera. However, Bruguera later contacted IPC and asked to buy the license rights directly from them, thus bypassing Bardon Art. FACING PAGE: A war themed pen and ink illustration by Jordi Badía Romero, brother of Enric (of Modesty Blaise fame) who also signed his work as Jorge B. Gálvez. ABOVE: Science-fiction pen and ink art by Juan Sarompas, an artist who mainly worked for the foreign market and was one of the main artists on the James Bond strip published by Semic in the Scandinavian countries.