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 complicate ...

, 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 . It is also a and format, similar to the size of a DVD case. These sizes evolved from the printing ...

, adult

comics a Media (communication), medium used to express ideas with images, often combined with text or other visual information. It typically the form of a sequence of Panel (comics), panels of images. Textual devices such as speech balloons, Glo ...

whose themes were

sex Sex is the biological trait that determines whether a sexually reproducing organism produces male or female gametes. During sexual reproduction, a male and a female gamete fuse to form a zygote, which develops into an offspring that inheri ...

violence Violence is characterized as the use of physical force by humans to cause harm to other living beings, or property, such as pain, injury, disablement, death, damage and destruction. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines violence a ...

, and horror.

Biography

Alessandro Biffignandi was born in 1935 in

Rome Rome (Italian language, Italian and , ) is the capital city and most populated (municipality) of Italy. It is also the administrative centre of the Lazio Regions of Italy, region and of the Metropolitan City of Rome. A special named with 2, ...

Italy Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land b ...

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

Topolino ''Topolino'' (from the Italian language, 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. Since 2013, it has ...

'', 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 Scrooge McDuck. The first Disney comics were newspaper strips appearing from 1930 on, starting with t ...

, 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) or cinema (English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English), also known as a movie house, cinema hall, picture house, picture theater, the movies, the pictures, or simply theater, is a business ...

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 advertis ...

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 Bussum () is a commuter town and former municipality in the Gooi region in the south east of the prov ...

website Biffignandi moved to

Milan Milan ( , , ; ) is a city in northern Italy, regional capital of Lombardy, the largest city in Italy by urban area and the List of cities in Italy, second-most-populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of nea ...

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

comic strip A comic strip is a Comics, sequence of cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often Serial (literature), serialized, with text in Speech balloon, balloons and Glossary of comics terminology#Captio ...

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. * British national identity, the characteristics of British people and culture ...

market on assignment from

Fleetway Fleetway Publications was a magazine publishing company based in London. History 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 t ...

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 Courier (Dundee), The Courier'', ''Evening Telegraph (Dundee), The Evening Telegraph'' and ''The Sunday Pos ...

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

fumetti Photo comics are a form of sequential storytelling using photographs rather than illustrations for the images, along with the usual comics conventions of narrative text and word balloons containing dialogue. They are sometimes referred to in ...

'' 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 whe ...

, 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 a painting method involving the procedure of painting with pigments combined with a drying oil as the Binder (material), binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on canvas, wood panel, or oil on coppe ...

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 ...

published a retrospective of his life's work.

Notes

External links

Sample of works by Alessandro Biffignandi
on

Tumblr Tumblr (pronounced "tumbler") is a microblogging and Social networking service, social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and is owned by American company Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content ...

Spaghettifumetti
{{DEFAULTSORT:Biffignandi, Alessandro 20th-century Italian illustrators Italian magazine illustrators Italian erotic artists Italian horror artists 20th-century Italian painters Italian male painters 1935 births 2017 deaths

Biography

See also

Notes

External links