EXTRACTS: Illustrators Crime Comics Special © 2020 Book Palace Books (144 pages in full edition)

120 about the strip. Describing the way I had originally conceived Torpedo, Toth said, "The strongest way I can put it is Torpedo is a bastard!", and I said: ‘Basta!!’, which is Spanish for “Enough”, because the way he wanted to portray Torpedo was to tell the story of a “nice” gangster, a gangster who shows remorse, a gangster a bit like Errol Flynn. I have to say, in his defence, that this cartoonist was a delightful person, charming, I liked him a lot, but we were at odds: he wanted to write the story of a murderer who shows remorse, and I wanted to write the story of a murderer who doesn't show any remorse whatsoever. And since I had started writing the script, it seemed reasonable that I should continue to do it in my own way. In the end, the editor, who had to decide what to do, agreed with me and so didn’t take it any further with Toth. To his credit, Toth was responsible for coming up with the name, Torpedo, and the 1936 addition was Toutain’s idea.”. After this disagreement between the cartoonist and the scriptwriter, the script was left in a drawer until Toutain offered the series to Jordi Bernet. Bernet was a seasoned professional with a twenty year career under his belt. Bernet’s debut was at the tender age of fifteen with the Bruguera publishing house in 1960. Bernet’s father, Miguel Bernet Toledano, alias Jorge, had been working on a popular humoresque strip character of Doña Urraca, when he died at the relatively young age of 38. With the family’s main source of income now gone the younger Bernet was left to pick up the reins. He continued the strip and received the same pay rate as had his father. However, the strip was relatively ABOVE: Bernet (left) and Abulí (right) manning their stand at the Barcelona Comic Fair in 1982, after the strip had been assigned to Bernet in the wake of Alex Toth’s intransigence over the handling of the lead character delaying the launch the series. FACING PAGE: Torpedo, Rascal and one of the strip’s many femme-fatales.