Lívia Rusz

Lívia or Livia Rusz (Hungarian pronunciation: , ; September 28, 1930 – February 26, 2020) was a Romanian and Hungarian graphic artist, best known for her work in illustration, comic strip, and comic book genres. One of the most recognizable contributors to these fields during Romania's communist period, she created popular children's comics such as Mac and Cocofifi, before signing as one of the main illustrators for Editura Ion Creangă publishing house. She subsequently produced illustrations for many of the company's principal releases, including an edition of Ion Creangă's Childhood Memories and the first Romanian-language edition of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.

A member of the Hungarian-Romanian community, Rusz escaped communist political pressures by settling in Budapest, Hungary in 1987. She continued to live there, and has also become recognized as a contributor to the Hungarian comics school.

Biography Born in Cluj (Kolozsvár), Lívia Rusz was from a Hungarian-Romanian family. She grew up in a mixed environment, among local Hungarians and Romanians, and, according to her own recollection: "My road was opened by a school with exceptional spirituality, where I was taught to respect and maintain traditions, to treasure the eternal cultural values, to preserve and take care of our identity so as not to offend the others". The first local publication to employ Rusz was the Hungarian-language Napsugár, where she first met writer Sándor Fodor, with whom she collaborated on the cycle of books Csipike (known as Piticul Cipi in Romanian). Also during that interval, Lívia Rusz became the first Romanian illustrator of J. R. R. Tolkien's work, when she contributed drawings for The Hobbit (in its original 1975 edition, marketed by Editura Ion Creangă). She continued her activity, becoming a noted contributor to the Hungarian comic school Her activity under communism nevertheless coincided with a decline in the overall impact of Romanian comics: while exercising ideological control over the comic strip scene, the Romanian Communist Party reputedly preferred to invest in animation, seeing it as a more effective propaganda tool. In this context, Rusz and Eugen Taru were among those who still produced comics able to reach the general public (a category which also included, according to one assessment, Ion Deak, , Puiu Manu, , Dumitru Negrea, and Ion Popescu-Gopo). it became internationally known only in the decades after 1989, when Rusz's illustrations were republished by Douglas A. Anderson.