Aurelio Galleppini

Aurelio Galleppini, known by the artistic name Galep, the graphic creator and artist of Tex, was born in Casal di Pari (Grosseto) on August 28, 1917, to Sardinian parents, and spent most of his youth in Sardinia, where he left his studies in the second year of technical school to devote himself to drawing and painting, which he pursued as a self-taught artist. At eighteen, his drawings appeared in animated short films made for a German manufacturer of two-stroke projectors.

Galleppini's first drawings printed in periodicals date to 1936: illustrated fairy tales for Mondo Fanciullo. From 1937 to 1939 he contributed to Modellina with his first illustrated tales – In terra straniera, La prova dei coccodrilli, All'ombra del tricolore, and Le avventure di Pulcino (the latter a large humorous color album) – in addition to drawing several covers for Il Mattino Illustrato and illustrating Il segreto del motore by Andrea Lavezzolo. In the same years he drew two long comics stories for Mondadori, scripted by Federico Pedrocchi: Pino il mozzo and Le perle del mar d'Oman.

In 1940 he moved to Florence, where he began collaborating with the publisher Nerbini. In L'Avventuroso, numerous comics stories came to light, some of which he also scripted. The regime's preventive censorship and other absurd measures, which distorted the content and form of comics stories, led him to temporarily suspend all activity in the field. In the immediate postwar period, Galep devoted himself to painting – with flattering success – to poster art, and to teaching drawing.

In 1947 he resumed his work as an illustrator with a series of albums for L'Intrepido, among them Il clan dei vendicatori, Il corsaro gentiluomo, Il giustiziere invisibile, and La perla azzurra. He also illustrated books such as I Tre Moschettieri, La Maschera di Ferro, Le Mille e una Notte, Il Barone di Münchhausen, and Pinocchio (the latter in comics form).

Toward the end of 1947 he made his first contacts with the director of the Milan-based L'Audace editions for a new collaboration. For Tea Bonelli he illustrated the fortnightly periodical Occhio Cupo and the weekly booklet Tex, both written by Giovanni Luigi Bonelli. Tex marked a turning point in Aurelio Galleppini's artistic career, to which he devoted his every effort, save for brief and exceptional pauses, such as the story L'Uomo del Texas, produced in 1977 on scripts by Guido Nolitta for the series Un Uomo, un'Avventura.

Galep drew the Tex stories alone for many years, until the scale of the publication required the hand of other artists. All the series' covers through issue 400 are nonetheless his. It was a dedication – indeed, almost a symbiosis – interrupted only by his death in Chiavari (Genoa) on March 10, 1994.