Remember When I Told You About Jordi Bernet?

Maybe you don't remember what I said about Jordi Bernet. Understandable, since that was over twenty years ago. Allow me to tousle your memory a bit.

In the 1980s, Spanish comics artist Jordi Bernet made his international mark by drawing the very salty crime series Torpedo 1936. The editions are long out of print, but click here to see an image of the character I found on a foreign Amazon.com site.

At the time, I was writing and drawing commentoonies for the Comics Buyers Guide. Anything in the world of comics that sufficiently made either a positive or negative impression on me was fair and fertile fodder for my pen and brush.

The Bernet artwork on Torpedo definitely impacted me, and I wasted no time in whipping together a commentoonie about the artist and the strip. Click here to see what was printed in CBG #607 back in 1985.

I bring this up now because Mr. Bernet has been making his way back into American comic books lately. A few months ago DC Comics dedicated an issue of their SOLO series to him, and just a couple of weeks ago he drew the cover and interior of Jonah Hex #13. Mr. Bernet will likewise be drawing issues 14 and 15 of Jonah Hex. I would encourage any fan of excellent comic artwork to seek out these issues. I found a recent interview with Mr. Bernet that you can read here.

An interesting aside: It seems to me that J. Hex 13 is the first DC or Marvel comic book in quite some time to number the story pages. Marvel numbered their pages throughout the 1960s and up to 1971 or 1972, and DC numbered theirs through the 1980s and I think into the 1990s, but I had given up hoping that the practice might be resurrected. Being a math teacher, I am ALWAYS pleased to look at numbers!

One other sly aside: Did you notice how I slipped the 'word' "commentoonie" into my narrative as if it were actually a word? Well, now it is!