Overall: 52.5cm (20.7in) x 38cm (15in)
Gouache on board. Original cover artwork for Fleetway's Battle Picture Library No. 88 ‘Green for Go’, working title ‘Sten Gun’. Published with the tag line ‘For the paratroops, every battle drop was a dice with death.’ Republished as War picture Library No. 703 (1971) under the title ‘Crack Up’. Inscribed and bearing the artist’s studio stamp of Alessandro Biffignandi verso.
Alessandro Biffignandi (1935-2017) was one of several Italian illustrators hired by Fleetway’s Battle Picture Library to communicate to a target audience of post war British children what their ‘fathers and uncles had been through in combat’. Biffignandi trained at the Favalli Studios in Rome and moved to Milan in 1958. From 1961 Fleetway fought its own battle against its arguably more-famous rival Commando comics. Biffignandi went on to produce striking covers across many other genres, and, after the sale of Fleetway in the late 1980s, turned to book illustration and calendars for, amongst others, Italy's fraud squad, the Italian Guardia di Finanza.
