Sergio Tarquinio, the master cartoonist of the western, has died at the age of 100

Born in Cremona on 13 October 1925, he was not only a cartoonist, but also an illustrator, painter and engraver. The western was his genre of choice, but he was able to take his art far from the American frontier. Despite having been interested in drawing since he was a boy, he graduated as an Industrial Expert before being drafted into the Navy to fight in the last months of the Second World War. In the very poor immediate post-war period he refused a job in the Alfa Romeo technical office, not wanting to commute between Cremona and Milan, and initially worked as a painter for signs and billboards. On the advice of a friend, he created some test panels of the Western genre, and this was precisely the genre in which he made his professional debut, with two stories for the Dea publishing house.

In the first years of his career he modeled his graphic style on that of Frank Robbins in “Johnny Hazard”, and thanks to this he found a job at Editrice Dardo. Immediately afterwards, however, he obtained a very advantageous contract with the Argentine Editorial Abril, thus moving in 1948 to the suburbs of Buenos Aires, where he would later be joined by colleagues such as Hugo Pratt, Mario Faustinelli, Alberto Ongaro and Ivo Pavone. He returned to Italy in 1952, also due to the political climate that was taking shape in the South American country, and returned to collaborate with Editrice Dardo and then joined Rinaldo Dami’s thriving studio, which produced several comics for the English-speaking market. It is precisely with Dami that Tarquinio – despite ranging between genres enough to even draw Batman – manages to dedicate himself in particular to the much loved western, telling, among others, the stories of Sitting Bull, Buffalo Bill and Crazy Horseo.

It is a particularly intense period, working-wise, because not having exclusive contracts Tarquinio accepts several jobs at the same time, thus finding himself forced to draw in a continuous cycle to meet deadlines. However, he always finds time to paint and make engravings, with the artistic field increasingly interesting him. In 1959 Sergio Bonelli asked him to work exclusively for his publishing house, and Tarquinio did so by continuing a character he was already working on for the international market, Redcoat, and then propose the adventures of Judge Bean which Sergio Bonelli/Guido Nolitta himself will write the screenplay.

After some short stories, in 1966 he effectively joined the staff of Storia del West, of which he drew 34 episodes, starting from the fourth until the end of the series in 1981. Three years later he left Bonelli to move to “Giornalino”, where he drew a long story set during the American Civil War. This is his last work in the comics field, because after forty years of activity Tarquinio prefers to dedicate himself exclusively to painting and engraving. A field in which, by his own admission, he was able to find that personal aesthetic that had always eluded him in comics, so much so that in 2013 he was named Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.