"Antonio di Padova" comic by Dino Battaglia

My recent acquisition—a comic page from the comic Antonio di Padova from 1980. The comic was drawn by Dino Battaglia, an Italian master of comic art and one of my idols. 

When I was acquiring this comic, I didn't know I would get a secret bonus. Dino very often coloured his comics with watercolour on the back of his comics. Every page got photographed twice, front and back. Then the line shot of the drawing on the front will be combined with a black halftone of the back part. That way, the linework stays crisp and sharp, and the colours soft.

I scanned both sides of the page and combined with photoshop, just to see how it would have looked like. 

 

 

Survival

I was introduced to Les Lilley by Ervin Rustemagic in 1978 at the Lucca festival in Italy. We socialized there for a couple days together with Joe Kubert, Dino Battaglia, José Antonio Muñoz, Bobby London, Sergio Toppi, and Hugo Pratt.

Three months later through Irwin, I received a one page scenario for comics title Survival. I liked the scenario  a couple months later I drew a six page comic and I sent it to Les. He was quite surprised because he originally intended that the page which he sent to me was just a draft for a comic. Because of my poor english, I had misunderstood. Luckily he loved the comic as I had drawn it.

In 1980, that comic was published in Heavy Metal magazine among other places. That same year Heavy Metal, bought rights to turn the comic into an animation for their Heavy Metal animated movie. Unfortunately turned out that the drawing was too complicated for the technology of animation at that time.

Life as a Comic.

Dino Battaglia checking out my comics and introducing me to Sergio Toppi at in 1978. Photos by Ervin Rustemagic.