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3.The Authors
- University Press of Mississippi
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78 CHAPTER THREE The Authors ANDREA PAZIENZA Pazienza is without doubt the most renowned among the authors of the new Italian comics. Barely in his 20s, Pazienza had already been published in the era’s most important comic magazines including Cannibale, Il Male, Frigidaire, Linus, Alter, Corto Maltese, and Comic Art. Unfortunately, as is often the case with artists, Pazienza’s widest audience and greatest critical acclaim arrived posthumously, following his premature death at 33. As a result, Pazienza is one of the few comic artists of the ’70s and ’80s whose work has been entirely reprinted and collected in books—even by prestigious literary publishers such as Einaudi—ensuring its availability outside the circuit of specialized bookstores and collectors. His popularity continued growing during the ’90s, and a commercially successful (if somewhat tame) movie adaptation of his most popular stories, Paz, was released in 2001. Approaching an exegesis of Pazienza’s works means confronting an artistic body of considerable entity—surprisingly so—if one considers that his presence in the publishing industry spanned barely a decade. An artist gifted with a sharp sense of humor but also able to center his poetics on the little horrors of daily life, in the course of his brief career Pazienza tried his hand at autobiography, political satire, adventure stories, comic book journalism, and urban narratives. His knack for combining comedy with tragedy, Dadaist suggestions, and journalistic approach was already evident in his first book-length work, Pentothal, a narrative set amidst the THE AUTHORS 79 ’77 Bologna riots where the hallucinatory quality of the narration blends effortlessly with the all-too-real historical background. This ability to idiosyncratically filter fiction and reportage is, besides the obvious impact of its graphical innovations, in the end the great achievement of Pazienza’s work: the formulation of a late twentieth-century naturalism that manages to avoid the seduction and clichés of a neorealist approach. While still a student at Bologna’s DAMS1 , Pazienza published “Armi,” his first comic in the magazine Alter. A brief story introduced by a quote by Tristan Tzara, Armi’s only characters were guns and rifles. In 1977 in the pages of the same magazine, he began publishing the first installments of Pentothal, an engagement that Pazienza kept until 1980. From its very first pages, Pentothal distinguished itself as a radically innovative effort in Italian adult comics. Firstly, it was an autobiographical narrative with Pazienza himself as the main character: a DAMS student and cartoon artist, occasionally transfigured into his counterpart, Pentothal (the name an obvious reference to the truth serum sodium pentothal). The autobiographical approach was an absolute novelty in the Italian comics canon, and its only antecedents were found in the context of the American underground, namely the works of Robert Crumb and, later, Justin Green. Furthermore, by setting his narrative in the Bologna of ’77, the epicenter of the Movement, Pazienza introduced two additional innovations to the comics medium: a precise contemporary historical background and a journalistic approach. Month after month, with each episode Pazienza documented the events surrounding the Bologna Movement firsthand and almost in real-time, so that—for the first time—comics became a source of information on current events. Pentothal’s initial episodes portrayed the violent clashes between students and the police, the arrival of the tanks employed by the city administration to sedate the tumults, the city university takeover, the student assemblies, the long lines at the college cafeterias, the introduction of heroin2 on the scene (which in a few years would claim the lives of both Pazienza and Tamburini), and even Radio Alice announcing the killing of student activist Lo Russo by the police.3 Lo Russo’s death occurred just a few days after the story originals for the first installment had been delivered to Alter for publication. Upon hearing of Russo’s death, Pazienza quickly substituted the last page in order to include the breaking news, and he personally delivered the new page right before the magazine’s issue went to press (in much the same manner a newspaper editor would deliver a last-minute news item to be inserted on page one). [3.93.173.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:02 GMT) 80 THE AUTHORS However, this documentary component is undermined by Pazienza’s attitude toward his own narration: Pentothal is in fact the first comic of a considerable length (127 pages) to employ the stream-of-consciousness technique. An internally focalized...