EXTRACTS: British War Comics Illustrators Special © 2018 The Book Palace (144 PAGES in Full edition)

61 comics weekly. It was, however, for the war comics Fleetway published that Biffignandi worked the most, doing over 400 covers by the decade’s end. Biffignandi painted mostly with tempera (gouache wasn’t available in Italy at the time), or watercolours in the early days, and then, when they came into existence, switched to acrylics. During a visit to the Louvre museum in Paris, he was struck by Eugene Delacroix’s painting ‘The Massacre of Chios’. This painting would inspire a change of style in his work, as he attempted to reproduce Delacroix’s way of expressing himself with tiny brush strokes. Biffignandi also began to paint with tiny brush strokes, almost as if he were sketching a drawing, in a style that looked almost pointillist. He also added some odd colour tones: doing backgrounds in an almost monochrome colour with reds, greens or ochres, and sometimes all those colours at once. TOP RIGHT: 'Victory Cry', cover to Battle Picture Library No. 231 (1965), tempera. All Images © IPC Media