Federico Bertolucci is an Italian comic artist and illustrator. He is best known for his award-winning series of silent wildlife graphic novels, LOVE. Alongside French writer Frédéric Brrémaud, Bertolucci has illustrated four volumes, LOVE: The Tiger, LOVE: The fox and LOVE: The Lion and LOVE: The Dinosaur. Bertolucci was nominated in this year’s Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards for Best Painter/Multimedia Artist.
In 1998, after completing a course in comics at the Disney Academy in Milan and graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara, Bertolucci was hired by Disney Italia as an artist for their weekly Topolino magazine.
A few years later, in 2001, he started working for Disney Italia’s W.I.T.C.H. magazine. In addition to illustrating stories and covers of the series, he also contributed to several special issues and the first Panini sticker collection. He also produced short stories for Monster Allergy, The Flintstones, and coloured the comic adaptation of Disney’s Lilo & Stitch.
At the same time, he was embarking on a working relationship with Frédéric Brrémaud. Richard Coeur de Lion, was a two-volume book written by Brrémaud, and drawn and coloured by Bertolucci. It was published in France by Soleil between 2005 and 2007. The book was later published in Italy and Spain in 2008 by Planeta DeAgostini. The creative duo went on to work on Les Tennismen (Bamboo, 2006), Rocambole de Ponson du Terrail (Delcourt, 2009), before finally starting the series LOVE.
The LOVE series was originally published in France by Ankama Éditions and has been translated for Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Germany. The first book, LOVE: The Tiger, was published in 2011 and won the “Grand Guinigi – Special Jury Award” at the Lucca Comics festival. The series was picked up by American independent publisher, Magnetic Press in 2014. Magnetic Press has published three of the four volumes so far.
You can find out more about Federico Bertolucci on his blog, follow him on Facebook and Twitter. You can even watch him work on his YouTube channel.
