Sanjulián

Manuel Pérez-Sanjulián Clemente was born in Barcelona on 24 June 1941. As a young man he saw drawing as a hobby rather than a career. After finishing secondary school at about 16 he enrolled at the Barcelona School of Nautical Studies, intending to follow family tradition and become a merchant mariner.

To earn extra money he assembled a portfolio of portraits of film stars and offered his services to film distributors as a poster artist. After several rejections, Fox gave him a trial commission around 1959, an advertising piece for The Diary of Anne Frank. A family friend who worked as an art restorer then urged him to study fine art, and he left nautical school to attend the Sant Jordi academy in Barcelona between the ages of 20 and 25.

When film poster work in Spain dried up, he drew romance comics for the publisher Bruguera, a style he disliked. Through a fellow student he joined Josep Toutain's agency Selecciones Ilustradas around 1961, drawing historical, detective, western and romance strips, largely for the British market. After his military service he asked to paint colour covers. Toutain rejected his first attempts, then offered to buy every cover he produced at that standard, and from then on Sanjulián worked mainly as a cover illustrator, painting for Scandinavian, European and British publishers including Futura, Fontana and Harrow.

From the early 1970s the agency began taking American commissions. Warren Publishing hired him for horror and fantasy covers on Vampirella, Creepy, Eerie and later 1984, work he regarded as the most satisfying of his career, and his fee per cover rose sharply. He went on to paint covers for Dell, under an exclusive and later a priority contract, and for Avon, Ace, DAW, Bantam, Fawcett and Berkley. His covers for Conan paperbacks, beginning with Conan and the Sorcerer in 1978, brought a flood of sword and sorcery commissions. He also painted for Heavy Metal and Realms of Fantasy and drew some comics, including two film adaptations and a series for the Spanish magazine Cimoc.

He left Selecciones Ilustradas in 1984 and was represented by the Norma agency of Norma Editorial, working mostly for the United States. In Spain he painted advertising for Winston and the PortAventura theme park, film posters for director Juan Piquer Simón, including Mystery on Monster Island (1981) and Los diablos del mar (1982), and several posters for the Sitges Fantastic Film Festival. He prepared sketches for The Empire Strikes Back and, at Mel Gibson's request, for Braveheart, though neither poster was used. He exhibited at the Society of Illustrators in New York and was a guest at the 2008 Emerald City Comicon. In later years he painted mainly for private collectors, and one of his works entered the permanent collection of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles.

Sanjulián lived for many years in Sitges, on the coast south of Barcelona, a town closely tied to fantastic cinema through its annual film festival. He was married and had two children; his son, Manuel, posted news of his death. A lifelong film lover, he painted tributes to the classic monsters he grew up with, from King Kong and Ray Harryhausen's dinosaurs to Boris Karloff's Frankenstein. He described each illustration as an adventure and said that in that sense he had lived many.

Sanjulián died on Wednesday, 14 October 2026, in Sitges, aged 85. His death fell during the Sitges Fantastic Film Festival, for which he had painted several posters. His friend David García Sariñena, director of the documentary Sanjulián: El poder de la ilustración, announced the death on 15 October, citing the family. The cause of death was not made public.

Tributes came from RTVE, ABC, Fumettologica, downthetubes and fellow artists. ABC's critic called him simply a titan for readers who discovered comics in the 1980s, and illustrator Frederick Cooper said his Warren covers remained some of the finest examples of fantasy and horror illustration ever produced.

Sanjulián was one of the leading figures of the Spanish generation, trained at Selecciones Ilustradas, that conquered the American illustration market in the 1970s. After Frank Frazetta moved on, his covers dominated the Warren magazines, and his Vampirella paintings helped fix the character's look. His original paintings are sought after by American and Japanese collectors. The San Sebastián Horror and Fantasy Film Festival honoured him with a solo exhibition in 2021, the documentary Sanjulián: El poder de la ilustración appeared the same year, and books on his work include Sanjulian: Master Visionary (2001), a Book Palace monograph (2022) and Diábolo's Sanjulian: La fantasía ilustrada (2025).