Eduardo Barreto

Eduardo Barreto
Eduardo Barreto by Michael Netzer
Born	Luis Eduardo Barreto Ferreyra 1954 Montevideo, Uruguay
Died	December 15, 2011(2011-12-15) (aged 57)
Nationality	Uruguayan
Area(s)	Cartoonist, Penciller, Inker
Pseudonym(s)	Kopy, S. Gneis
Notable works	Batman, Judge Parker, The New Teen Titans, Superman
Awards	1993 Wizard Fan Award for Best Graphic Novel, 1997 Silver Morosoli for Graphic Humor, Caricature, and Comics

Luis Eduardo Barreto Ferreyra (1954 – December 15, 2011) was an Uruguayan artist who worked in the comic book and comic strip industries including several years of prominent work for DC Comics.

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. Two of his children, Diego and Andrea, also work in comics, Diego as an artist, and Andrea as a colorist; both occasionally collaborated with Eduardo Barreto.

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.

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.