Fernando Fernández obituary

Spanish artist who filled the pages of 1950s British comics

In the late 1950s, Fernando Fernández, who has died aged 70, was one of the youngest of a group of Spanish artists working for the British comics publisher Fleetway Publications. Only 17 when his first strips were published, Fernández filled the pages of British comics for the next decade, though he did so anonymously.

In the UK, he earned his reputation for his work on Fleetway's Air Ace Picture Library, the romance comics Valentine, Marilyn and Roxy, and a variety of book covers. In the US, he is remembered for his highly stylistic contributions to the publisher James Warren's horror comics, including the eerie Rendezvous, which was voted one of the leading stories to appear in Warren's magazines.

In Spain, his finest work, which combined his talents for storytelling and painting, began to appear in the 1970s. He was also a highly regarded portrait painter. His elegant and romantic images were shown in more than 100 exhibitions around the world and featured in museums and private collections, including that of King Juan Carlos.

Born Fernando Fernández Sánchez in Barcelona, he began drawing as a young boy. As a teenager, he was employed as a clerk, and at night did laboratory and factory work so that he could pursue a business studies course. His first professional drawing assignment consisted of inking Antonio Biosca's Chispita, el Hijo del Jinete Fantasma (Chispita, Son of the Ghost Rider) for Editorial Grafidea in 1955. The following year, his self-penned strip Ghost Ship! earned him a place at Josep Toutain's Selecciones Ilustradas studio in Barcelona, a leading centre for young Spanish artistic talent, where he worked alongside José González, Jose Beá, Luis García and, later, Esteban Maroto and Carlos Giménez.

Selecciones Ilustradas had recently established a connection with Fleetway and supplied dozens of strips to their newly launched teenage girls' titles. In 1958, Fernández began working for Valentine, whose strips were inspired by romantic song titles (eg Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?), and Schoolgirls' Picture Library.

Over the next few years, he contributed numerous serials and complete stories to Marilyn and Roxy, including Never Again, the tale of a young girl with no memory, innovatively recounted through the notes of an investigating police officer and the doctor treating her case.

When his family moved to Argentina, the 18-year-old Fernández quickly found work with the Buenos Aires-based comics El Gorrión, Puño Fuerte and Tótem Gigante, while continuing to work for Fleetway. After returning to Spain two years later, he alternated between drawing war comics for Air Ace Picture Library with illustrations for women's magazines published in Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Germany. He also wrote strips drawn by Rafael Auraleón, Adolfo Buylla and Pedro Añaños before switching exclusively to illustration, his book covers appearing in Europe and the US.

In the 1970s he drew a humorous strip, La Mosca (The Fly), for the daily Diario de Barcelona, which ran for three years, and returned to regular strip work. From 1974 to 1979, he worked on a series of educational comics for young children, winning numerous awards, including the national illustration prize from the Spanish Ministry of Culture in 1977.

He then experimented with a variety of storytelling techniques, which ranged from L'Uomo di Cuba (The Man from Cuba), set during the Spanish-American war of 1898, and Círculos (Circles), a series of experimental short stories published in the Spanish comic 1984. For the latter, he also produced the award-winning science-fiction serial Zora y los Hibernautas (Zora and the Hibernauts), about how the discovery of hibernating men causes a war in an all-female future society orbiting the dead planet Earth.

An adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula continued his experimentation with the baroque style of Zora, painted in oils and originally serialised in Creepy magazine in Spain. As well as adapting a number of stories by Isaac Asimov, Fernández continued to produce his own projects, including La Leyenda de las Cuatro Sombras (The Legend of the Four Shadows), written by Carlos Trillo, and Zodiaco (Zodiac).

In 1989 he retired from comic strips to concentrate on his paintings, and in 2004 he wrote an entertaining autobiography about the years he spent as a comic-strip artist, Memorias Ilustradas.

Fernández is survived by his wife, the artist and writer María Rosa Lleida, with whom he collaborated on stories for the satirical magazine El Jueves (Thursday) and the comic Cimoc. Their son, Héctor Fernández, is also a painter.

• Fernando Fernández Sánchez, painter and comic strip artist, born 7 February 1940; died 9 August 2010