'Veszélyes Találka', an adaptation of John Erskine novel 'The Brief Hour of Francois Villon', for Füles (1965).
István Biai-Föglein was a Hungarian painter and book illustrator, who briefly worked as a comic artist in the 1950s and 1960s.
Early life and career
István Biai-Föglein was born in 1905 in Besztercebánya, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but nowadays a city in central Slovakia, known as Banská Bystrica. Between 1924 and 1929, Biai-Föglein studied at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, where among his teachers were the painters János Vaszary and István Csók. After graduation, he spent the first half of the 1930s traveling through western Europe on a study tour, visiting France, Italy and the Netherlands. In 1936, he spent one year at the Artist's Colony in Szolnok, a city at the heart of the Great Hungarian Plain. As a painter, Biai-Föglein was mainly noted for his colorful depictions of circus and stage performers, street scenes and still lifes.
Book and comic illustrator
From 1945 on, Biai-Föglein worked as an illustrator for several book publishers. Throughout the 1950s, he made drawings for most historically themed books, written by Géza Gárdonyi, József Révay, Péter Földes and Ilona Bús. During this period, he also had his short excursion into comics. For writer Péter Kuczka, he made the drawings for 'A Tollas Kígyó Unokája' ("Granddaughter of the Feathered Snake", 1956), a comic book for the "Little Rainbow Library". Created in the text comic format, it told the story of 16th-century Spanish conquistadors who caused the fall of the Aztec Empire. His other comics were created for the 1965 annual of Füles magazine, including an adaptation of a chapter of the 1937 John Erskine novel 'The Brief Hour of Francois Villon' ('Veszélyes Találka'), written by the magazine's editor Tibor Cs. Horváth. His other story was 'A Bors-nemzetes Iázadása' ("Rebellion of the Pepper Nation").
Death
In 1974, István Biai-Föglein passed away in Budapest.
'A Tollas Kígyó Unokája' ("Granddaughter of the Feathered Snake", 1956).