Manuel Pérez Clemente—known to the world as Sanjulián—celebrated his eightieth birthday yesterday.* A native Catalan, he grew up in Barcelona, studying art at Belles Arts of Sant Jordi. Sanjulián debuted on American shores in 1970, doing covers for Warren Publishing--he started right around the time Frazetta quit doing Warren covers and right before Ken Kelly made his debut. A classic run of paintings for Eerie, Creepy, Vampirella and 1984 ensued. Sanjulián would be associated with Warren until its demise in 1983.

Sanjulián soon branched out into paperback covers, illustrating the likes of A. Merritt, Robert E. Howard and Tanith Lee.

I discovered Sanjulián's art during what I call his 'golden age'. He was still doing Warren covers but he was all over cool paperbacks, especially the Ace reprints of the Zebra Robert E. Howard paperbacks. I quickly decided that when it came to 'photo-realistic' fantasy art, I much preferred Sanjulián to Boris. There was just a certain gritty grimness that Boris lacked. The Sanjulián covers also tended to be more dynamic.

Sanjulián did paperback covers right up through the 1990s. In the 2000s, he shifted to crafting more private commissions while still painting the occasional comic cover or portfolio. He also published several artbooks, the most recent being Sanjulián: Master of Fantasy Art (2020).

Nowadays, Sanjulián makes his home in Sitges, Catalonia. He is still doing plenty of commissions. Sanjulián’s new art for sale can be found at corner4art.com. His official website hasn't been updated since 2016, but his Facebook page is quite active, posting pics of Manuel himself, along with new work. Sanjulián's current commercial projects include paintings for Goodman Games, Creeps magazine and Dynamite Comics.

Per molts anys, Manuel. Thank you for all the decades of cool art!

Below is a gallery of Sanjulián art spanning five decades. Enjoy!

*The blog software ate the post I wrote—on time—last night. Of course it did. The first time that’s happened in forever and the first time in a long time that I didn’t have my text backed up. I slogged back to the keyboard and recreated the whole thing all over again.