Tanino Liberatore

Gaetano Tanino Liberatore was born in 1953 in the town of Quadri, the province of Abruzzo. After graduating from the Art High School in Pescara, he went to Rome, where he enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture, and began working with advertising agencies and designing record covers for the RCA company. After meeting Stefano Tamburini in 1978, he published his first comics in the magazine Cannibale. The first issue of the magazine Frigidaire was published in 1980 and in it Liberatore, together with Tamburini, published Ranxerox in New York, Ranxerox: Happy Birthday Lubna. The third and last instalment of Ranxerox 3: Amen! was published in collaboration with Alain Chabat. In the magazine Frigidaire there are also famous illustrations from the Bordello and Clienti series. At the same time, he illustrates covers for the best European magazines, advertising posters for important festivals, the cover of Frank Zappa’s album The Man from Utopia, designs sets and synthetic characters for French and Italian television and for the theatre. He won the César Award for the costumes in the film Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra directed by Alain Chabat. For the French publisher Glénat, he created amazing illustrations for two classic works of French literature: The Adventures of Young Don Juan Guillaume Apollinaire and The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire. In 2018, COMICON Edizioni published his book Ranx, an extensive Art Book in honour of the four decades of this synthetic robot. With the Milanese publisher Feltrinelli Comics, he published the Art Book Body Count in 2019 and designed the cover of Roberto Saviano’s book Le storie della paranza.