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Gianni De Luca (bornFortunato De Luca (27 [25] January 1927 – 6 June 1991) was anItalian comic book artist, illustrator, painter and etcher.
De Luca was born atGagliato and moved toRome when he was 6 y.o. He attended Architecture; however, he soon moved to comics and started his career as comics artists in 1946 for the magazineIl Vittorioso with Anac the Destroyer, followed in 1947 by the Da Vinci Wizard (Leonardo da Vinci), and then The Empire of the Sun and the Last Days of the Earth.
In the late 1950s he started to collaborate with theEdizioni Paoline, a Catholic publisher, and with their weekly magazineIl Giornalino. In 1957–1959 he worked atLa più grande storia mai raccontata ("The Greatest Story Ever Told"), a series of tales based on the Bible, andI dodici in cammino (a history of the Christian Church).
In 1969 he drew a western, Bob Jason, and started his most famous creation,Commissario Spada, a series featuring a commissioner of the criminal police ofMilan, characterized by an unusual (for Italian comics) attention to realistic details, written byGianluigi Gonano. For the series De Luca introduced a number of graphical innovations, which he later used also for the comics version of threeShakespeare's masterworks,Hamlet,The Tempest andRomeo and Juliet, written by Raoul Traverso. De Luca won aYellow Kid Award for Commissario Spada in 1971.
After the end of the Commissario Spada series in 1982, De Luca continued to work forIl Giornalino with the comics version ofIl giornalino di Gian Burrasca, adapted byClaudio Nizzi, then to theAdventure on the Orinoco, written by Roberto Del Prà, and comics biographies ofTotò andMarilyn Monroe. These were followed by the science fiction series Paulus, with stories by Tommaso Mastandrea, depicting a historian living in a future dictatorship who, using a time machine, reproduces the life ofSt. Paul. In 1988 he worked to the adaptation of a historical novel,La freccia nera, followed byI giorni dell'impero ("The Days of the Empire"), set inImperial Rome and left unfinished after De Luca's death at Rome in 1991.
