Aurelio Galleppini

Aurelio Galleppini: Four Hundred Covers, One Face

Between 1948 and 1994 an Italian draughtsman who signed himself Galep drew the cover of every single issue of *Tex* — all four hundred of them, from the first to the one that appeared in the year he died. Nothing else in comics quite matches it: not a run, a stewardship. Four hundred times he had to make a man in a buckskin shirt look like the same man, and four hundred times make the picture sell a magazine on a newsstand crowded with rivals. He had abandoned his technical studies in the second year and taught himself to draw.

A Self-Taught Hand from the Maremma

He was born on 28 August 1917 in Casal di Pari, in the province of Grosseto, in the hard, malarial Tuscan Maremma — Lambiek's Comiclopedia records the date as 17 August, one of the small discrepancies that trail a career begun in the pulp trade. His parents were Sardinian, and it was Sardinia, where he grew up, that supplied the landscape memory he would later graft onto the American West: the scrub, the dry light, the rock.

He had almost no formal artistic training. Bonelli, his publisher for nearly half a century, describes him bluntly as largely self-taught, a young man who walked away from school in his second year to draw. At eighteen his work was already being used in animated cartoons made for a German projector manufacturer — commercial, anonymous, paid.

The Apprentice Years

His first periodical publications came in 1936, illustrated fairy tales for *Mondo Fanciullo*. From the mid-1930s he was working steadily in comics: *Il Segreto del Mohore* alongside the writer Lavezzolo, then *Pino il Mozzo* and *Le Perle del Mar d'Oman* with Federico Pedrocchi for Mondadori — adventure serials, the industrial staple of the era.

By the early 1940s he had settled in Florence and was contributing to *La Patria* with *La Conquista dell'Atlantico* and *La Fiamma che non si Spegne*. He also appeared in *L'Avventuroso*, the great Italian adventure weekly of the Fascist period, with *La Sirena dell'Artide* — printed under the misspelling "Caleppini," a small humiliation of the jobbing illustrator's life.

Then the army took him. He returned to civilian life in 1947, moved to Milan and picked up work for *Intrepido* and *Albi dell'Intrepido*. Late that year he approached the publishing house behind *L'Audace*, run by Gian Luigi Bonelli. It was the decisive knock on a door.

30 September 1948

The first collaboration was *Occhio Cupo*, in *L'Audace*. The second changed Italian publishing. On 30 September 1948, *Tex* appeared in the *Collana del Tex* — not as a comic book but as a *striscia*, a horizontal strip pamphlet measuring 16.5 by 8 centimetres, the cheapest possible format for the poorest possible market in a country still clearing rubble. Bonelli wrote it. Galleppini drew it.

The economics of that format are worth understanding, because they explain the man. The strips came out weekly. Between 1948 and 1967 the character ran to 973 issues across thirty-six series. Galleppini produced the artwork essentially single-handed for years — a rate of output that in any other medium would be described as industrial, and that he sustained while holding a consistent visual identity across tens of thousands of panels.

In 1958 the strip migrated to the larger *Gigante* format, which in time became the main line. The physical model for the hero's face was Gary Cooper — a borrowing that tells you exactly what Galep was doing. He was not illustrating the American West. He was illustrating the Italian idea of the American West, assembled from Hollywood and from Sardinian rock, and he made it more durable than most of the films it came from.

Devotion, or Symbiosis

Bonelli's own account is that *Tex* "marked a turning point in the artistic activity of Aurelio Galleppini, who thereafter devoted himself body and soul to this publication," and calls the relationship a "devotion (indeed, virtually a symbiosis)." The evidence supports the language. Galleppini drew the interiors of the first forty issues, then #42 through #90, then scattered volumes across the following decades — and, more importantly, every cover from number one to number four hundred, with only rare exceptions.

He did stray occasionally. He illustrated *Gulliver's Travels* in 1954. In 1977 he drew *L'Uomo del Texas*, scripted by Sergio Bonelli — the founder's son and by then the publisher — for the prestige series *Un uomo, un'avventura*, a rare instance of Galep working outside the weekly machine.

Why Aurelio Is Called a Genius

This is a craft claim, not an intellectual one, and it deserves to be stated as such. Galleppini did not invent a graphic language, theorise about the medium or leave a body of formally innovative work. He was a self-taught commercial illustrator who spent forty-six years on one property. What he had was something rarer in the trade than invention: absolute reliability at speed, combined with a designer's grasp of what a cover has to do.

Break the skill into parts. First, consistency of likeness — holding a face recognisable across four decades and thousands of drawings, through changes of format, printing quality and his own ageing hand, without the character drifting into someone else. Second, compositional economy at postage-stamp scale: a *striscia* panel is tiny, and Galep had to stage gunfights, canyons and crowds inside it legibly, in cheap ink on cheap paper. Third, the cover instinct — four hundred single images that had to work as posters, at arm's length, competing for a coin.

The honest counter-case: much of what makes Tex iconic is Bonelli's writing and the character's moral architecture, and Galep's own visual vocabulary was frankly derivative, built on American cinema and the conventions of the adventure weeklies he grew up drawing for. He borrowed Gary Cooper's face rather than inventing one. If genius means originality, the word does not fit. If it means the total command of a craft applied without interruption for half a century — an artist who *became* a national character's handwriting — then it does, and Italian comics have no better example.

Legacy

Galleppini died on 10 March 1994 at Chiavari, near Genoa, still working, with issue 400 on the stands. The series he launched with a weekly strip in bombed-out Italy is now published in Brazil, Finland, Norway, Greece, Turkey, Croatia, France, India, Serbia, Bosnia, Israel, Spain, Britain and the United States, and it never stopped: in 2018 Bonelli launched a new *Tex Willer* title going back to the character's youth. Every artist who has drawn him since has drawn a face that Galep settled.