Claudio Nizzi

Now recognized as a master of Italian comics, Claudio Nizzi was born in Sétif (Algeria) in 1938. He made his debut as a scriptwriter in the pages of Il Vittorioso with Safari, a series drawn by Renato Polese that ran from 1963 to 1966. Nizzi then tried his hand at short stories and novels, before returning definitively to comics in 1969, beginning a long and fruitful collaboration with Il Giornalino, in whose pages he even devoted himself to romance and humorous tales.

In comics he successfully tackled every genre: from African adventure (Steve Damon) to seafaring tales (Capitan Erik), from adaptations of the great classics of literature (I Promessi Sposi, L'isola misteriosa, Un capitano di quindici anni) to the western. His most famous comic of this phase of his career is precisely a western: Larry Yuma, a gunslinger whose gaze is always hidden beneath the brim of his hat. His career naturally also included police characters, such as Tenente Marlo and the likeable Rosco & Sonny, protagonists of exploits that were at times more humorous than mysterious.

In the mid-1980s he began alternating with Gianluigi Bonelli in writing the scripts for Tex, a task he continues to carry out with skill and mastery. In 1988 he created Nick Raider, the first police series published by Sergio Bonelli Editore, of which he also handled the supervision until 1992, when the considerable demands of producing the Tex stories forced him to entrust its supervision to Renato Queirolo. After ceasing to write in 2013, he returned to the pages of Tex at the end of 2019, going on to write several more adventures starring the beloved Bonellian ranger.