Gianni De Luca, born the 27th of January 1927 in Gagliato (Catanzaro), grew up in Rome, where he attended artistic high school, and afterwards Architecture class at University, that was soon dropped looking forward to the debut in comics world.
His first appareance is in 1947 on the weekly magazine “Il Vittorioso”, with a short story about the life of Leonardo da Vinci, titled Il Mago da Vinci: since his debut De Luca shows his elegant and peculiar style. In his run on “Il Vittorioso”, De Luca dedicates himself to short stories set mostly in the past: from viking and aztec to egyptian society.

In 1951 he publishes Gli ultimi sulla terra, a sci-fi apocalytical story written by Eros Belloni.
The collaboration with “Il Vittorioso” ends in 1957, and soon afterwards he starts a new cooperation with the religious publisher Edizioni Paoline.
As a matter of fact, on the weekly magazine “Il Giornalino” De Luca draws an impressive “History of Catholic Church” and the comic adaption of the Bible, both collected in a book, still printed nowadays: I dodici in cammino and La più bella storia mai raccontata.
After an intensive run as an illustrator and cover artist always for the same magazine, he returns to comics with some stories with a western background.

In 1970 De Luca starts drawing the episodes of the Il Commissario Spada series, created by journalist Gian Luigi Gonano. The series is set in Milano and stars, as main character, an Interpol officer, widowed, who lives with his teen son. Il commissario Spada is a series inspired by contemporary society, written for a teenager audience. In spite of this, the authors advance unusual thematics for this kind of readers: stories dealing with drugs, terrorism, organized delinquency, depression after economical boom in the seventies Italian society, generational crash, hippies communities, reminiscences of civil war during Second World War.

During the run of Il Commissario Spada series, De Luca brings to his style more and more revolutionary formal innovactions: the rendering of motion, the layouts new solutions, the abatement of single frames towards a concept of page as an endless sequence, the combination of graphic and painting techniques.
This experimentation process deepens in the trilogy based on Shakespeare’s works (The Tempest, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet), published by “Il Giornalino” in 1975 and 1976.
After the comic adaptations of other literature classics as Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca and The Black arrow: a tale of the two roses, and after a sci-fi transposition of the life of Saul of Tarsus, Gianni De Luca dies in Rome the 6th of June 1991, leaving unfinished the story I giorni dell’impero, posthumously published by “Il Giornalino” in 1993.