Alfredo Alcala

Alfredo P. Alcala (born August 23, 1925 in Talisay , Philippines, † April 8, 2000 in California , probably San Pedro ) was a Filipino comic artist , cartoonist and painter.

Life and work

Alcala dropped out of school as a teenager in order to be able to concentrate fully on his decision to become an artist. After initially designing posters, signs, information sheets and other graphic advertising material, he spent several years designing household items and furnishings such as table lamps, garden furniture and even a preacher's pulpit for a company in the iron processing industry.

During the Second World War, Alcala began to work increasingly as a cartoonist. Among other things, caricatures were created during this time that were devoted to his homeland against the Japanese invaders. He made "more active" resistance against the Japanese occupiers by using his extraordinary visual memory to memorize the locations of Japanese positions as well as to study the equipment and weapons of the Japanese while walking and cycling through his hometown and in the vicinity of the Japanese garrisons to draw these - when they returned home - from memory. The resulting maps and graphic replicas of Japanese facilities were finally passed on to the Philippine guerrilla movement, which Alcala used for their fight against the Japanese. Alcala's true-to-the-original replicas from memory were of particular importance because it was practically impossible to take photographs of the facilities in question due to the presence of guards and, furthermore, forbidden under penalty of death.

Inspired by the work of the Americans Lou Fine , Hal Foster (Prince Eisenherz) and Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon), as well as the British wall painter Frank Brangwyn , Alcala began working as a full-time draftsman of comic strips and notebooks in 1948. His first work in this area was created for the Philippine comic magazine Bituin Komiks, followed by numerous works for the publisher Ace Publications, the largest publisher in his home country at the time. Alcala's drawings can be found in the booklets of the Filipino Komiks, Tagalaog Klassiks, Espesial Komiks and Hiwaga Komiks series of the later 1940s.

Within a few years Alcala developed into one of the stars of the Filipino comic industry, which was reflected in the naming of a comic magazine after him, the Alcala Komix Magazine .

In 1963 Alcala succeeded with the fantasy comic Voltar , which he created and which the World Encyclopedia of Comics admits to be one of the earliest examples of an epic comic series that was created from the imagination of only one man, on the US comic market, where Voltar became a huge commercial success. Accordingly, in the early 1970s, he began to work for DC-Verlag, the largest American comic publisher, for which he oversaw various fantasy and horror series. Working for DC also led him to move to New York in 1976.

In the later 1970s and early 1980s he worked as a pencil draftsman for the Star Wars and Conan the Barbarian series , which were published by Marvel Comics at the time, for the Marvel series Man-Thing , as well as some uses as an ink pen for Don Newton's pencil work for the traditional series Batman and the adult comics Hellblazer and Swamp Thing. Authors he worked with included Alan Moore , Gerry Conway and Len Wein .

In the 1990s, he worked for cartoon productions and commercials, designed toys and finally returned to the comic industry as an illustrator for the Swamp Thing series . In April 2000 Alcala, who left behind a wife and at least one son, died of cancer after a long illness.

literature

• Heidi MacDonald and Phil Yeh: Secret Teachings of a Comic Book Master - the Art of Alfredo Alcala .

Web links

• Alfredo Alcala in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Obituary from The Comics Reporter
• Mark Evanier: POV Point of View. Alfredo Alcala. News from me, January 5, 2012, accessed February 22, 2014 . 
• Article from Lambiek