Manuel Pérez Clemente, the Barcelona-born painter the world knew simply as Sanjulian, died on 14 October in Sitges, the seaside town south of Barcelona where he had lived for many years. He was 85. If you ever lingered at a newsagent’s top shelf in the 1970s, pretending to be interested in Famous Monsters while actually staring at the cover of Vampirella, there is a decent chance you were looking at his work.
Born in Barcelona in June 1941, he did not set out to be an artist at all. He first enrolled at the city’s school of nautical studies, and only later, after a family friend who restored paintings suggested fine art, did he train at the Sant Jordi academy. The Spanish merchant navy’s loss turned out to be the paperback spinner rack’s gain. His first paid job, around 1959, was a poster for Fox advertising The Diary of Anne Frank. Romance comics for Bruguera followed, and then he joined Josep Toutain’s Barcelona agency, Selecciones Ilustradas, which was busy exporting Spanish talent to publishers all over Europe and America. He drew historical, detective and Western strips, and Toutain steered him towards painted covers. After his military service, British readers began meeting his work on paperbacks for Futura, Fontana and Harrow.
The breakthrough came in the 1970s, when Selecciones Ilustradas began supplying covers to James Warren’s horror magazines. Spanish painters arrived at Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella in force, and Sanjulian quickly became one of the house’s best. He painted Vampirella from issue 12 onwards, and his lush, theatrical style (often compared to Frank Frazetta, whom he admitted studying closely) suited a line of magazines that sold, unashamedly, on the strength of their covers. According to Spain’s El Debate, he regarded those Warren covers as the work that gave him most satisfaction. American paperback houses noticed too, and he went on to paint covers for Dell, Avon, Ace, DAW, Bantam, Fawcett and Berkley. Robert E. Howard’s barbarian was among his subjects. “When paperback books became popular, I was commissioned to create two covers featuring the character of Conan,” he once recalled, with what sounds like characteristic modesty.
He left Selecciones Ilustradas in 1984 and later worked through Norma Editorial’s agency, painting comics for Cimoc, adverts for Winston and the PortAventura theme park, and film posters for the Spanish fantasy director Juan Piquer Simón and the Sitges film festival. His paintings were exhibited at the Society of Illustrators in New York, and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has his work in its science fiction, fantasy and adventure galleries. A documentary about him, El poder de la ilustración (2021), was directed by David García Sariñena. He has also been honoured with several art books, including Book Palace’s Sanjulian: Master of Fantasy Art (2022) and Diábolo’s Sanjulian: La fantasía ilustrada (2025). Long before those, we reviewed Sanjulian: Master Visionary, and Warren’s whole Spanish contingent got its due in Illustrators‘ special issue on the Spanish artists.
The tributes have been warm. García Sariñena wrote that he had “no words right now to describe the deep sorrow I feel”, and signed off: “Rest in peace, maestro.” His son, Manuel Sanjulian Jr, remembered a father who was also “a beloved artist, admired and recognized worldwide,” and shared one of his sayings: “In every painting I paint, there is an adventure.” (These are quoted in English by Downthetubes, whose tribute is well worth reading.) The news reached English-language fandom through Arnie Fenner in File 770.
Sanjulian is survived by his wife and two children. Several generations of readers met his barbarians, vampires and ghouls before they ever learnt the name of the man who painted them, and that is the illustrator’s lot. Still, few cover artists got so many adventures on to the front of so many magazines and paperbacks.
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