The Italian cartoonist Gabriele Di Caro was born and grew up in the coastal city of Livorno in Tuscany. After a vocational baccalaureate in graphic design, he studied painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, alongside comics at the Scuola Internazionale di Comics (International School of Comics). His training in both fine art and sequential drawing has given his work a distinctive combination of assured draughtsmanship, painterly colouring, and a strong feeling for the human figure.

In 2013 he began working as a cartoonist for Il Vernacoliere, the long-established satirical magazine from his home city. The same year he published Donne: Luci e Ombre (Women: Light and Shadow), a collection of his watercolours, establishing the two strands of his career – comics and painting – which have continued alongside one another. He subsequently worked on a variety of historical and educational comics, including adaptations of Goldoni’s La Locandiera (The Mistress of the Inn) and Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar), as well as contributing to collective projects published by Petit à Petit.

Di Caro’s first major erotic graphic novel was Sous le paradis (Beneath Paradise), published by Tabou in 2019, a collection of short stories inspired by François Truffaut’s film L’homme qui aimait les femmes (The Man Who Loved Women). He followed it with Les arcanes de la Maison Fleury (The Arcana of Maison Fleury), a three-volume historical mystery set in nineteenth-century London, before moving to an American setting with Le fruit le plus doux (The Sweetest Fruit), published by Tabou in 2025–6.

Di Caro has also worked outside the European erotic comics market, including drawing Fire and Ice: Teegra for Dynamite Entertainment. Across these very different projects, his work is marked by an evident pleasure in period settings, elaborate interiors and, above all, the human figure. His erotic comics combine sensual imagery with an unusually strong interest in character, atmosphere and narrative, making him one of the more distinctive contemporary artists working in European erotic comics.

Gabriele Di Caro still lives and works in Tuscany.

Gabriele Di Caro’s Instagram account, where he showcases recent work and maintains an artist’s diary, is here.

Similar artists

Giovanna Casotto – Contemporary Italian illustrator whose realist eroticism parallels Di Caro’s.
Eric Fischl – American painter whose suburban secrets beneath respectability echo Le fruit le plus doux.
Vittorio Giardino – Fellow Italian storyteller whose 1950s-set drama shares a similar historical unease.
Giuseppe Manunta – His soft, watercolour-like Italian line closely matches Di Caro’s.
Georges Pichard – French illustrator whose ornate period settings anticipate Di Caro's historical mysteries.
Alex Varenne – His atmospheric anthology stories share the same narrative genre as Di Caro's.