Cha' Bril: Cover Gallery

Who is the mysterious Cha' Bril? His career in the UK was brief and even then had a stop-start quality to it which made me wonder whether Cha' Bril was actually a pen-name used by someone who knocked out some SF covers between other assignments.

His work appears in two batches: first, two covers for Badger Books in July 1960 illustrating R. Lionel Fanthorpe's Asteroid Man and A. J. Merak's Hydrosphere. Then an eighteen month gap until around January/February 1962 when three further covers appear from Digit Books: C. Verheyne's Jack the Ripper novel Horror, and two very poor SF yarns, The Uncharted Planet by V. Ranzetta and Split Worlds by Tyrone C. Barr.

Cha' Bril was, in fact, a European artist who produced dozens of covers for the Spanish publisher Toray's SF series Espacio — El Mundo Futuro in 1954-58. The covers included just about every pulp cliche you could think of but were typical of the period and some were vastly better than others. Given his prolific output for that one series — 82 covers can be found here — and the lack of any further information on Cha' Bril, I still wonder if the name is a pseudonym.

Espacio #71, Invasores de la Tierra by Johnny Garland (1957)

 

Espacio #86, Persecución en la órbita by H. S. Thels (1958)

Espacio #17, Los hombres arañas de Titán by Louis G. Milk (1954)

 

Espacio #7, Pánico by S. D. Haltes-Falmor (1954)

 

Untraced but possibly inspired by Espacio #61, Vagabundos del infinito by Red Arthur (1957)

(* The header illustration can be found dotted around the internet, but I believe it was originally published here.)