Drawn and Dangerous: Italian Comics of the 1970s and 1980s

1. Italian Adult Comics Before '77

11 CHAPTER ONE Italian Adult Comics Before ’ The Italian comics of the late ’70s and ’80s belong to a particular niche of the medium of sequential art we identify here as “adult comics.” The term “adult,” rather than referring exclusively to content (although content represents an important discriminating factor) or to an aesthetic and arbitrary cultural evaluation, is employed here simply in reference to the postulated age-group that these works target and, consequently, to the specific competence of their implied readership. It is true that a strict distinction between comics for young readers and those meant for adults is often problematic and indeed, many grey areas exist; one has only to consider the possible double readings offered by such comics as Walt Kelly’s Pogo, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, or Lyonel Feininger’s Kin-der-Kids. Nevertheless, the great majority of these works, their capacity to provide an engaging and satisfying aesthetic experience for adults notwithstanding, were marketed to young readers. Curiously, for a medium traditionally regarded as entertainment for children and young adults—comics in its infancy were consumed indiscriminately by all age groups: from the pioneering work of Rodolphe Töpffer in the early 1800s to the Sunday newspaper supplements devised by William Randolph Hearst at the turn of the twentieth century. Comics became a literature exclusively for the young with their independence from the newspapers and the appearance of the first comic books around the mid-’30s.1 This step in the evolution of the medium is extremely relevant , not only because it defined an exclusive age group as readership, but by placing comics below the radar of official popular culture, it laid 12 ITALIAN ADULT COMICS BEFORE '77 12 the groundwork for the development of adult comics some three decades later. As Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik note: Comic strips, like the movies, were a public and ceremonial form. They were part of a larger experience of the newspaper, integrated into a ribbon of wars and sports and society. They had a place in a hierarchy. A comic book, on the other hand, was something you had to walk into a store and buy; it was in its very nature outside parental control. (. . .) The comic book presupposed, as a condition for its existence, the fragmentation of the genuinely mass or folk audience that had embraced the comic strip. (182) Contrary to the development of the medium in America, comics appeared in Italy toward the end of the first decade of the twentieth century exclusively as children’s entertainment. The most prestigious publication in these early stages was Il Corriere dei Piccoli, a separate weekly supplement to the venerable newspaper Il Corriere della Sera (still in print today). In the ’30s, American comics, along with Italian productions, began being published in magazines such as L’Avventuroso (1934) and L’Audace (1935) and the medium opened its readership to young adults. Especially successful were the American adventure comics such as Flash Gordon, Mandrake, The Phantom, and the homegrown sci-fi of Saturno contro la terra (scripted by the future theorist of cinematic neorealism and Bicycle Thief screenwriter, Cesare Zavattini). By 1938, in a country where illiteracy still possessed a large percentage of the population, L’Avventuroso sold nearly 600,000 copies per week, doubling the success of contemporary literary bestsellers such as those by Pitigrilli or Guido da Verona. Apart from a brief period of censorship (1938–1943) and a partial embargo aimed at American comics imposed by the Fascist regime, Italian publishers never adopted protectionist measures such as those imposed by France in the post-war years. On the contrary, the strong presence of U.S. comics seemed to have stimulated local production. In fact, Italian authors absorbed their form and content and then reformulated them in an all-but-Mediterranean fashion (a similar trend emerged again in the ’60s and ’70s with the phenomenon of Italian genre cinema—especially with spaghetti westerns and crime movies). An example of the cultural (and political) colonization Italy was undergoing at the time, Italian comics of the post-war years were mostly adventure comics, reflecting—and often—rewriting—many popular American ITALIAN ADULT COMICS BEFORE '77 13 genres, especially westerns (Tex, Pecos Bill, Kit Carson were among the most popular Italian comic book heroes of the time) and science fiction (particularly Superman, who, after a few short-lived name changes, was...