'Tokyo y Yo' (2023).
Luis Mendo is a Spanish graphic designer, illustrator and comic artist, who has spent most of his professional career in The Netherlands and Japan. After several years working in magazine design for agencies in the Netherlands, he switched to making illustrations, which can be found on books, websites, magazines, advertising and clothing worldwide. Early in his career, he was part of the alternative Spanish-Dutch comics collective Los Tres (1999-2002). By 2023, he returned to the comics medium with autobiographical comics like the graphic novel 'Tokyo y Yo' (2023) and his own subscription-based platform 'Mundo Mendo' (2024- ).
Illustration/comic for Illustoria Magazine (March 2025).
Early life
Luis Mendo was born in 1969 in the Spanish city of Salamanca into a working-class family. His father was a firefighter and car mechanic; his mother was a housewife for most of her life. While he has described his father's side of the family as pragmatic church-goers, his mother came from an artistic family, mostly in applied arts. Mendo dropped out of school at an early age and started working with his father in the garage, repairing cars. His lucky day was when someone who worked in the city's art school came to have his car repaired, and when he saw Luis, he convinced him to try art school. After a few years in the Escuela de Artes y Oficios de Salamanca, he went on to study graphic design at the Escuela de Arte número 10 (now called "Artediez") in Madrid. For his last year, he moved to Groningen and studied graphic design at the Minerva Art Academy and ended up staying in The Netherlands for 20 years.
Early influences on Luis Mendo's art were Spanish comic artists from the Bruguera stall: Francisco Ibáñez, Raf, Jan and Manuel Vázquez. As he grew older, he also learned to appreciate international artists like Jean-Jacques Sempé, Hergé, André Franquin and Ted Benoît. In his teens, Mendo discovered more adult-oriented artists, coming from alternative Spanish comic magazines like Cairo and Madriz. Among his favorites were Daniel Torres, Sento, Raúl, Javier Olivares, Javier De Juan and Federico Del Barrio. Later in life, he has mostly admired illustrators like Jillian Tamaki, Adrian Tomine, Georges Beuville and Quentin Blake.
Professional career
In the Netherlands, Luis Mendo had his first proper job as a graphic designer for magazines and newspapers. Ever since, he has remained active in the print industry, and the editorial world in particular, working with editors and publishers as either a designer or creative consultant. Since the late 1990s, Mendo has been senior designer and creative director at Lava Design (1998-2005) and then ran the GOOD Inc. agency (2005-2014), which had businesses in Amsterdam, Tokyo and Barcelona. Always at the vanguard of new developments in his profession, he has written about his trade on his own magazine design blog, BladBlog (2007-2011), while exploring the future of digital magazines through the research project he set up with Erwin van der Zande, Screenzine (2009-2014). Between 2007 and 2013, Mendo was a teacher in design, art and visual creation at the Barcelona Autonomous University (UAB) Postgraduate School. In his own title, The Illustrated Magazine (2015-2024), he highlighted fellow creatives in short interviews.
Los Tres, introducing themselves in Zozolala #124 (June 2002).
Los Tres
During the first 40 years of his life, drawing was mostly a hobby for Luis Mendo. Between 1999 and 2002, he formed the Amsterdam-based comics collective Los Tres, which also consisted of fellow Lava designer Arjen Klinkenberg, AKA "Klink", and another Spanish expat, the illustrator and webdesigner Cristina García Martín. At an Amsterdam garden party in 1999, the three decided to start a fully independent comic magazine, fuelled by Mendo's and García's Spanish cultural comic heritage and Klink's Dutch pragmatic "polder mentality". In the next couple of years, Los Tres published 3 issues of their self-titled zine, in which they freely experimented and enjoyed themselves with comic art.
Los Tres #2, and a Los Tres comic for the backcover of VPRO-Gids.
After 2002, Cristina García Martín (b. 1974) moved on to work as a commercial animator through her agencies Garciacity and All Things Moving, and has additionally been an illustrator for children's books and magazines. Arjen Klinkenberg (b. 1974) stopped drawing and continued his career in graphic design and branding, working notably for Tony's Chocolonely chocolate. Luis Mendo, on the other hand, continued to make comics, but for the next 20 years, this was limited to an occasional contribution to some zines and magazines made by friends.
Illustration for El País Semanal, about buying old houses and living with the ghosts of the former tennants.
Tokyo: illustration and comics
Since 2012, Luis Mendo has been living in Tokyo, Japan. Together with his wife Yuka, he was the creative director and co-founder of the creative residency Almost Perfect (2018-2025), where creatives from all over the world were welcomed to stay, create and show their work. In Tokyo, Mendo began working as a professional illustrator, working for brands worldwide, while having his work exhibited in New York City, Tokyo, Paris, Seoul and other cities. His magazine illustrations have appeared in the Financial Times, El País Semanal, The Guardian, Harper's Magazine, De Volkskrant, and other international titles.
'Tokyo y Yo' (2023).
By the 2020s, Luis Mendo picked up making comics more actively again, riding on his previous professional experiences for their production. In an e-mail to Lambiek, Mendo said: "Having been a graphic designer and art director has helped me create a world behind the illustration and comic work. I tap everyday into this knowledge and you can see the design background in everything I do. For instance, I made my own typefaces for the text in the balloons and for headlines."
'The Thing That This Is' (Mundo Mendo, 6 April 2026).
Mendo's comics are personal in nature and deal with his thoughts, children, Japan life, countryside life, creativity and being a creative. Often, the artist portrays himself as a bird, either anthropomorphic or as the actual animal. For a big exhibition of his illustration work in Seoul, South Korea, Mendo decided to accompany the show's catalogue with his first graphic novel, called 'Tokyo y Yo' ("Tokyo and Me"). After its first Korean publication in June 2023 by Media & Art, a Spanish version was published by Norma Editorial in November of that year.
In 2024, Mendo started an online membership program called 'Mundo Mendo', where members get access to regularly published comics. Once a year, they are treated with a pocket-sized book collection of around 270 pages, the first having appeared in September 2025.
Self-portrait.