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Introduction
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
3 Introduction In October 1977 the magazine Alter, at that time the most prestigious publication of adult comics in Italy, featured a fourteen-page story by Filippo Scòzzari titled “Un buon impiego” (A Good Position). Set in a nottoo -distant future in and around the Italian city of Bologna, “Un buon impiego” told the story of Louigi (sic), an unemployed gay man who was preparing to kill the newly elected president and take his place. In Scozzari’s grotesque vision, Italy is a police state controlled by the Communist Party. On his way to the center of Bologna, Louigi passes several checkpoints, witnesses the killing of a political dissident by the party’s militia, and is repeatedly taunted by police officers because of his homosexuality, all the while concealing the gun he intends to use on the President. Having reached the square where the president is delivering his acceptance speech, Louigi takes advantage of the confusion generated by earlier assassination attempts (the first by a student protester, the second by a dissident intellectual), shoots the president and—in accordance with the law, takes his place. Compared to typical Italian adult comics of the time, “Un buon impiego” came out of nowhere and its uniqueness must have been immediately evident to readers. Alter was the sister magazine of the venerable Linus, the first Italian comics magazine to publish stories geared to an adult readership. Until 1977 Alter had published reprints of celebrated American strips such as Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, occasional stories by cutting-edge French artists such as Reiser, Jean-Claude Forest, and Georges Pichard—and a generous serving of works by established Italian auteurs such as Hugo Pratt, Sergio Toppi, and Dino Battaglia. Thelattergroup’sstoriesmostlydealtwiththeadventuregenre,imbued with references to the nineteenth-century American and European novel. Most importantly, both Linus and Alter belonged to the milieu of leftwing culture dominating the Italian landscape since the post-war years, and their editorial policies were to some extent in line with the politics of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). 4 INTRODUCTION The appearance of Scòzzari’s story in Alter showed that in 1977 things were changing fast—and not just in comics. Scòzzari’s dystopian future was clearly a grotesque satire of the myths of communist revolution and the rising sun of socialism perpetrated by the Party’s propaganda. What was not immediately evident to Alter’s readers accustomed to the political Manichaeism of the times, however, was the author’s ideological orientation . He certainly did not belong to the conservative right (a non-affiliation guaranteed, if nothing else, by his appearance in the pages of Alter), nor to the Catholic center-right, which had governed the country for the past thirty years. At the same time, his carnival-style satire of the Party, along with his irreverent portrayal of obtuse factory workers, cheering masses, senile Partisans, and the mocking references to Bologna’s Communist mayor, Renato Zangheri, made his association with the left-wing environment equally unlikely. What’s more, Bologna’s Communist administration was often referenced by the Party as a shining example of socialism at work. Therefore, the question on many readers’ minds was why the author speci fically targeted Bologna, the best of all possible cities. The answer was that Bologna had recently been the setting of one of the pivotal protests of the alternative left-wing Movement of ’77 and had consequently become the stage for one of the most brutal episodes of police repression of the decade. The mobilization of tanks employed to quell the riots, with the authorization of the city’s political administration , was conclusive proof to many that the official left no longer represented a viable alternative to the conservative Christian center-right. The roots of the student Movement of ’77 and its political background will be discussed, but note that for the first time in the field of adult comics— and for the first time in the Italian cultural arena at large—a non-aligned voice was commenting on present-day events, in real time, by mixing fiction and journalism. Even more relevant was the fact that this voice sprang from a venue as unexpected as comics. Besides the strictly political aspects of “Un buon impiego,” other qualities set Scòzzari’s story apart from earlier adult comics. For example, most Italian auteur comics belonged to the adventure genre, often as highbrow adaptations of literary classics (The Arabian Nights, Moby Dick, the short stories...