Pierluigi Baldassini
Italian inker whose credits span Dark Horse's Star Wars, Conan, and Tomb Raider, plus DC's DCeased: Dead Planet and Image's Near Death.
Pierluigi Baldassini—known to friends and colleagues as Gigi—is an Italian inker whose career spans the Italian, French, and American markets. Class of ‘68, he broke in at the turn of the millennium inking Italian serials, worked through the Jonathan Steele period at Star Comics, and built a deep, long-running partnership with fellow Italian artist Andrea Mutti, inking his work for publishers in France and the United States.
For Dark Horse, Baldassini has inked some of the company’s biggest licensed comics: the five-issue Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith: Spiral and Knights of the Old Republic, the video-game tie-in RAGE: After the Impact, and Conan the Barbarian #13–15. In 2013 he inked the second half of Tomb Raider: The Beginning—the Tomb Raider prequel by Rhianna Pratchett—on pages 29–52 of the 52-page book, with Nicolás Daniel Selma and Mutti on pencils and Juan Gedeon on the opening pages. That work is collected in the Tomb Raider Omnibus Volume 1.
His American credits continued with Image’s noir miniseries Near Death and Over My Dead Body, DC’s DCeased: Dead Planet, and recent Star Wars work on Hyperspace Stories, including a Boba Fett story and the Qui-Gon graphic novel. Perfect for fans of polished, European-school inking on big licensed properties.
