Artist Profile | Cartoon & Caricature

Antonio Hernandez Palacios

Antonio Hernández Palacios (Birth: 1921 – Death: 2000). He was a Spanish painter and caricaturist, creator of the series “Manos Kelly” and “El Cid”, among others. He was born in Madrid in 1921 and trained at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts, where he received classes from Vázquez Díaz, along with other artists such as Jorge Oteiza, Pedro Mozos and Francisco Cossio. The Civil War interrupted his career and his influence began in the illustration of film posters that gave him great mastery of plastic space and a certain tendency towards monumentality. He also drew some comics, such as the two chapters of “El Capitán Maravillas” (Valenciana, 1943). However, most of his professional life took place during these years, and until the end of the 60s, he worked in the advertising field, where he achieved great prestige and renown. Tired of an activity that is sometimes too demanding and very routine, and influenced by the new theatrical currents arriving from the other side of the Pyrenees, Hernández Palacios decided to turn his gaze to the world of comics, which he had already visited quite sporadically before. In this way, he prepared some plates of three possible series that dealt with police (Nuri Evans), historical (El Cid) and western (Manos Kelly) themes and presented them to the magazine Trinca, which at that time had just opened on the market. Spanish publisher. It was from that moment, 1970, when his work began to become better known. In Trinca the titles “Manos Kelly” and “El Cid” were published, as well as a new series “The Soldier's Pay”, all of them characterized by a spectacular and opulent drawing, far above the level of their scripts. These works in Trinca opened the doors of the European market for him and in 1974 he began to draw the western series “Mac Coy” for the French publishing house Dargaud, a title that was to be published in Spain by Grijalbo and of which he went on to make 21 albums. Parallel to this western, he made several works for the “History Pictures” collection of Ikusager Images, beginning in the midst of the political transition a series on the Spanish Civil War that he planned to develop in twenty volumes, of which he only managed to design “ Río Manzanares” (1979), “Euskadi in Flames” (1981) and “Gorka Gudari” (1987). For the same publisher, Roncesvalles (1980), created a magnificent historical fresco about the mythical defeat inflicted on the army of the Frankish king Charlemagne, concluding with “The Taking of Coimbra” (1982), the third album in his El Cid series, which had left unfinished in La magazine Trinca due to its closure. In 1984 he would perform “The Crusade of Barbastro”, the fourth and final album in this same series, of which many volumes were also planned and which also remained unfinished when the author died.