Alberto Breccia - Your Art History Reference Guide!

ArtHistoryClub Information Site on Alberto Breccia Art History Art History Search        Art History Browse             News        Gallery        Forums        Articles        Weblinks        welcome to our free resource site for all art history lovers!

Alberto Breccia

Alberto Breccia (born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on 15 April, 1919 died in Buenos Aires on 10 November, 1993) was a comic strip creator.

His parents settled in Argentina when he was three years old - they lived in the barrio district of Buenos Aires. After leaving school Breccia worked in a meat packing plant and in 1938 he got a job for the magazine El Resero , where he wrote articles and drew the covers.

He began to work professionally in 1939, when he joined the publishing house Manuel Láinez . He worked on magazines such as Tit-Bits , Rataplán and El Gorrión where he created comic strips like Mariquita Terremoto , Kid Río Grande and El Vengador (based on a popular novel) and adaptations.

During the 1950s he became an "honorary" member of the Group of Venice that comprised of expatriate Italian artists like Hugo Pratt, Ido Pavone , Horacio Lalia , Faustinelli and Ongaro as well as other honorary members such as Solano Lopez , Carlo Cruz and Arturo Perez del Castillo . With Hugo Pratt, he started the Pan-American School of Art in Buenos Aires. In 1957 he joined Frontiera Editorial , under the direction of Héctor Oesterheld , where he created several stories of Ernie Pike. In 1958 Breccia's series Sherlock Time began in the comic Hora Cero Extra , with scripts by Oesterheld .

In 1960 he began to work for European publishers via a Buenos Aries based art agency: for the Fleetway publishing house of England he drew a few westerns and war stories. This perid did not last long. (His son Enrique Breccia would also draw a few war stories for Fleetway in the late 1960s: i.e. Spy 13' )

He met with Oesterheld in 1962 to produce one of the most important comic strips of history: Mort Cinder , in which the face of the antique dealer Ezra Winston , companion of the inmortal Mort Cinder , is actually Alberto Breccia's own, and that of his protagonist the one of his friend and assistant, Horacio Lalia . Mort Cinder appeared for the first time on 20 July 1962 in Nº 714 of the Misterix magazine, and ran until 1964.

In 1968 Alberto was joined by his son, comic artist Enrique Breccia in a project to draw the comic biography of Che, the life of Che Guevara, again with a script provided by Oesterheld.

In 1969 Oesterheld rewrote the script of El Eternauta, for the magazine People. Breccia drew the story with a decidedly experimental style, resorting to diverse techniques to obtain a work that was anything but conventional and moving away from the commercial. Breccia refused to modify its style, which added to the tone of the script, and was much different from Solano Lopez original.

Last updated: 01-04-2007 01:18:57
The contents of this article are licensed from Wikipedia.org under the
GNU Free Documentation License. See original document.
Art History Search | Art History Browse | Contact | Legal info