Jose Maria Ortiz Tafalla is the painter most responsible for the visual identity of the Marvel UK Masters of the Universe weekly. A Madrid-born commercial illustrator working through the Selecciones Ilustradas agency, Tafalla brought to the assignment a European painted-cover tradition that traced through Spanish horror paperbacks, Italian fumetti, and the painted Conan covers Earl Norem and Boris Vallejo were producing for the American market.
Tafalla’s painting workflow was traditional gouache and acrylic on illustration board. Pencil underdrawing, painted highlights, opaque backgrounds, then lacquer sealing before the boards went to Egmont for scanning. The originals he retained surface occasionally at Spanish auction houses and at the Selecciones Ilustradas estate sales. A handful have moved through Heritage Auctions and Catawiki with hammer prices in the three to four figure range.
The aesthetic signature is the warm palette. Tafalla painted Eternia as a hot world. Where the American Alcala covers used cool greys and steel blues for armor and weather, Tafalla pushed everything toward red, orange, and gold. Castle Grayskull glows like a sunset on his covers. Skeletor’s robes catch firelight rather than moonlight. Battle Cat’s fur is closer to a Bengal tiger than the green-and-orange toy paint.
The figure work is rooted in the Spanish illustration tradition. Tafalla draws He-Man with slightly more elongated proportions than the American houses, closer to Frazetta’s Conan than to the squarer Mattel toy. The facial expressions are also less heroic and more determined-grim, which paired well with the slightly more violent UK strip content compared with the American Filmation tie-in books.
Tafalla also painted covers for the She-Ra Princess of Power weekly run (briefly, 1987 to 1988), for various Egmont annual one-shots, and continued through into Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow promotional materials in the 2000s before retiring. He passed away in 2021. The Selecciones Ilustradas archive holds the bulk of his original boards and has begun digitising for the Tafalla Foundation, with selected pieces being released through Catawiki auctions over the past three years.
For collectors of the original boards, expect Spanish auction houses (Salamanca Subastas, Setdart) to be the primary channel. For collectors of the printed comics, NM Marvel UK weeklies with Tafalla covers cluster around five to fifteen pounds in the UK secondary market, with the rare early issues running higher.
Catalogue source: heman.fandom.com, marveluk.he-man.org, Selecciones Ilustradas / Tafalla Foundation public records (CC BY-SA 3.0).
