Magnus (comic artist)

Magnus was the pseudonym of Roberto Raviola, an Italian comic author born in 1939 and died in 1996, best known for his fumetti neri, the Italian noir comics. After working for a while as an illustrator he began his comics career in 1964. He took the name Magnus as a self-ironic play on the Latin phrase Magnus Pictor Fecit, meaning a great painter did it. With the writer Luciano Secchi, who wrote as Max Bunker, he launched successful pocket-format series for the publisher Corno, among them Kriminal, Satanik and Alan Ford. In 1975 he began Lo Sconosciuto, and in 1977 he published the medieval fantasy saga La Compagnia della Forca with Giovanni Romanini, followed by the long saga I Briganti, based on a Chinese novel. His work also reached French readers through the magazines Métal Hurlant and L'Écho des Savanes, where he began the erotic graphic novel Les 110 Pilules. Shortly before his death he finished The Valley of Terror, a long episode of the Tex Willer series written by Claudio Nizzi for the publisher Bonelli.