The Italian cartoonist Vittorio Giardino grew up in Bologna, where he graduated in electrical engineering in 1969. At the age of thirty he decided to leave his job and devote himself to comics, and two years later his first short story, Pax Romana, was published in La Città Futura, a weekly magazine published by the Italian Communist Youth Federation and edited by Luigi Bernardi.

In 1982 Giardino created Max Fridman, a French ex-secret agent involved in the political struggle in the Europe of 1938. His first adventure, Hungarian Rhapsody, was serialised in the first four issues of the magazine Orient Express, bringing Giardino into the limelight of the international comic scene.

Starting in 1984, Giardino produced a number of short stories for Glamour International Magazine, where he introduced Little Ego, a young female protagonist who features in dreamy erotic stories, a format inspired by Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo.

In 1991 Giardino created a new character, Jonas Fink, for Il Grifo magazine. Jonas is a young Jew in 1950s Prague whose father is arrested by the communist police, after which he and his mother have to cope with the discrimination and oppression of the Stalinist regime. The book, collected as A Jew in Communist Prague, won the Angoulême International Comics Festival Prize for Best Foreign Comic in 1995 and a Harvey Award at WonderCon in 1999.

Giardino’s art style is reminiscent of the Belgian ‘ligne claire’ (bold line) popularised by Tintin creator Hergé (Georges Remi), while his subject matter owes much to spy story authors like Dashiell Hammett and John le Carré.

Vittorio Giardino’s website, with information about the artist can be found here (in Italian).

Similar artists

Nicole Claveloux – French illustrator whose whimsical, dreamlike comics share Little Ego's playful logic.
Guido Crepax – Italian originator of similar vignette-driven erotic fantasies to Little Ego.
Jean-Claude Forest – French cartoonist whose glamorous heroine roams episodic, fantastical sci-fi adventures.
Jean Giraud – French co-founder of the magazine circuit that introduced Little Ego to America.
Milo Manara – Italian illustrator whose erotic comics defined the genre Giardino works in.
Georges Pichard – His pen-and-ink heroines land in as many scrapes as Little Ego.