Luis Eduardo Barreto Ferreyra (1954 – December 15, 2011) was a Uruguayan artist who worked in the comic book and comic strip industries including several years of prominent work for DC Comics.
All of his children are artists. Two of them, Diego and Andrea, also work in comics, Diego as an artist, Andrea used to be a colorist & Guillermo who is an inker and illustrator. The three of them occasionally collaborated with Eduardo Barreto.
Early life
Luis Eduardo Barreto Ferreyra was born in 1954 in Montevideo, Uruguay. From the Sayago neighborhood, his childhood and youth house was in Calaguala street; and he grew up reading comics and being an avid supporter of his favorite soccer team, Club Nacional de Football. In interviews, Barreto reminisced about the time when, at age seven, he was reading a comic and decided he would grow up to be a professional comic strip artist.
Career
In Uruguay and Argentina
A self-taught artist, Barreto named Russ Manning, Hal Foster and Warren Tufts as his three main artistic influences. When he was 15 years old, his portfolio under his arm, he went to each and every newspaper in Montevideo looking for a job. With a Richard Lionheart biographical comic inspired by Foster's Prince Valiant, one of his favorite comics) as his strongest work and which he had intended to sell outside of Uruguay, he finally found a job at the newspaper El Día. The editor for the newspaper's children's magazine (El Día de los Niños) liked Barreto's art, but he asked him to do something more Hispanic. Thus, an adaptation of the Spanish epic poem Cantar de Mio Cid (The Lay of the Cid), was soon published in the magazine, scripted and drawn by Barreto, aged 16.
In 1974 he created a science fiction and space opera strip inspired by The Morning of the Magicians, a book by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. He created the strip intending to sell it to a syndicate, as his first love in comics was strips, and called it El Poderoso Halcón (The Mighty Hawk). In Uruguay, however, his only client was the newspaper magazine he was already working for, in which he published two pages featuring the character on Sundays. Many artist that had influenced his work include, Hal Foster (b. 1892), Warren Tufts (b. 1925), and Mark Schultz (b. 1955) along with many others.
A year later, Barreto sold the strip to United Press International, and the syndicate distributed his strips to some sixteen or seventeen newspapers in Latin America. There was even talk of translating it into English, but it never happened, due to international paper and oil crisis in the mid-1970s. At age 21, Barreto was publishing a strip all across Latin America.
Working outside Uruguay was a logical consequence of the career he had been forging for himself, a logical consequence of wanting to make a living in comics. Since making a full living from comics in Uruguay was impossible, he traveled to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to leave some samples in publisher Editorial Columba (house of comic anthology magazines El Tony and Dartagnan). He returned to Montevideo, and supplemented his comic work for El Día with artwork for advertising agencies.
After getting married and moving, he returned to Buenos Aires on vacation, and visited Columba again. The publisher's chief art editor, Antonio Presa, asked him why he hadn't answered the letter in which they offered him a position working on the strip Kabul de Bengala. Barreto never had received the letter, as it had been sent to his former address.
Starting in 1975, he worked for about three years for the Argentinian publisher, first living in the country for a year, working in the Nippur IV studio (which was named as the classic Argentinian historieta/character Nippur de Lagash). In the morning he worked in the Kabul art (scripted by H. G. Oesterheld), and in the afternoon he worked at the Nippur studio, as an assistant to Ricardo Villagrán; or rather a ghost artist. Among others, he worked on "Mark" (doing full pencils starting with issue seven). After that year he moved back to Uruguay, working there and traveling once a month to Argentina. By then he was working on several Nippur studio characters, but on his own, and signing his own name. Eventually, tired of Ray Collins' (Eugenio Zapietro) scripts, he signed his Kabul art with aliases, such as "S. Gneis" or "Kopy"; using the latter when he had to copy another artists' styles.