Juanjo Guarnido

Juanjo Guarnido was born in Granada, Spain, in 1967. He spent a large part of his childhood drawing, in the village of Salobrena, right by the Mediterranean Sea. His family later moved to Granada, which is where he got his degree in fine arts. He then participated in the making of several fanzines in Granada. During these years, he also published a load of illustrations at Cómics Forum (a Planeta DeAgostini label) for the Spanish publication of Marvel, which won him a pretty large Spanish audience. He then made contact with the comic book world and moved to Madrid, where for three years he worked on TV series for the animation studio Lapiz Azul. It was on his first day at Lapiz Azul that he met Juan Díaz Canalès, who would later be his writer for Blacksad. In 1993, he moved to Paris to join Walt Disney in Montreuil, where he worked as an animator until the business closed. Having always been a dab-hand on the European comics scene, he patiently began the long production of his first album, Volume 1 of Blacksad (Dargaud; Europe Comics in English), Quelque part entre les ombres (Somewhere Within the Shadows). Since then, even if while working on other projects, such as Sorcelleries (Dargaud), with Teresa Valero, or Voyageur (Glénat, collective project), he's focused a huge amount of his energy on Blacksad, an indispensable item of any comics fan's collection.