130 - Vance

Vance WILLIAM VANCE XIII The Complete Works, Vol. 4, Niffle - Cohen 1999 Original cover. Also used as the cover for *Historia BD - Cold War America*, published by Sophia Publications in 2021. Signed. Gouache and watercolor on heavy cardstock 54 × 65 cm (21.26 × 25.59 in.) This cover for a collected edition of XIII, created by William Vance, was also used to illustrate an issue of *Historia BD* on the Cold War. The atmospheric drawing, brimming with energy, shows that the Cold War isn’t cold at all—quite the opposite: XIII seems to be bursting out of a molten volcano, pursued by steel monsters… Vance has always loved military themes. Jean Van Hamme, in fact, traces the start of XIII’s success precisely to the fourth volume, S.P. A.D.S.: “William loves drawing soldiers, and don’t forget that my first reader and my first fan has to be my artist. William loves Hispanic settings and action scenes. What bothers him is when people are talking around a table, but that bothers all artists…” The audience, in any case, loved it. Van Hamme continued: “What interested me and what I discovered while writing this series were American neuroses. The assassination of Kennedy may be one of them, but racism, the Ku Klux Klan, McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, and more recently the Iraq War, weapons of mass destruction… are real neuroses that Americans are trying to forget… ” That is why amnesia is precisely the subject of XIII.