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Guido Crepax

Born in Milan in 1933, Guido Crepax created his first comic strip at the age of 12. Despite a degree in Architecture, he chose to work in the field of commercial art, on ads for brands like Shell, Campari, Esso, Standa and Rizzoli.
Courtesy of the magazine Linus, in 1965 he returned to graphic art and created his world-famous character, Valentina, one of the first comic heroines, and the only one to have aged in line with her creator. Guido also created refined and precise comic versions of numerous literary classics like Emanuelle, Story of O, Venus in Furs, Dracula, Frankenstein, Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde and The Turn of the Screw. Altogether he drew more than 5000 comic strips and his books have been published in 200 editions in every major language.

During his 40-year career he also drew hundreds of illustrations for newspapers, record-covers, household furniture, and fashion and design houses. He worked in drama, devised board games and drew dozens of lithographic prints, with several solo exhibitions dedicated to him in Italy and abroad. He has been the subject of appraisals by intellectuals of the calibreof Roland Barthes, Alan Robbe-Grillet and Umberto Eco. He died in 2003.