Luciano Bottaro
Luciano Bottaro (16 November 1931 – 25 November 2006) was an Italian comic book artist. Bottaro's characteristic style is highly appreciated in Europe - many countries publish his comics (such as France, Germany, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and in the former Yugoslavia, as well as such far flung sites as Argentina, Australia and Brazil). He was influenced by Otto Messmer's "Felix the Cat", Winsor McCay's "Little Nemo in Slumberland", Frederick Burr Opper's "Happy Hooligan", Rudolph Dirks's "the Katzenjammer Kids", and Barks and Gottfredson's Disney adaptations. Biography. Born in Rapallo, he abandoned his accounting studies for  cartooning in 1949. That year, he began his career for "Lo Scolaro", an Italian magazine, with the character Aroldo il bucaniere. He worked for "La Domenica del Corriere", Edizioni Alpe and Mondadori, the Italian Disney comics publisher: his first story was "Paperino e le onorificenze" written by Alberto Testa and published in 1952. In the same year he began to collaborate with Guido Scala and Franco Aloisi. They were subsequently joined by Carlo Chendi. Unofficially they were called "Rapallo's School", before the birth of the "Bierrecì Studios". Bierrecì Studios. Besides his work on Disney's characters, he worked on  other magazines, creating a lot of characters ("Whisky & Gogo", "Baldo", "Pon Pon", "Giò Polpetta", "Maramao"), and in 1958 he founded the Bierrecì Studios with Carlo Chendi and Giorgio Rebuffi. The first Bierreci Studios' publication was "Re di Picche", a comic book that published the adventures of the king of the cards, a pitiless and blood-thirsty parody of military world, inspired by "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". One of his most popular characters was "Pepito", the comical adventures of a 17th-century buccaneer who fights, among others, the greedy, grasping but essentially lovable Governor of a Spanish Caribbean colony. Published  in various countries in magazines that ranged from monthly to fortnightly, "Pepito" proved surprisingly more popular outside of Italy than in its country of origin. Several cartoonists began working with them, including Maria Luisa Uggetti, Tiberio Colantuoni, Ivo Milazzo, Giancarlo Berardi. They worked on several characters, including Mickey Mouse, Uncle Scrooge, Warner Bros. characters. They also produced the comics version of "Carosello", an Italian television program that, during the 1950s and 1960s, played the first Italian advertisements. Reprints. Fantagraphics has since 2018 reprinted some of Bottaro's Disney comics in volumes of the "Disney Masters" hardcover series. Luciano Bottaro Luciano