137 Notes CHAPTER ONE 1. The first comic book hosting original material, New Fun, appeared in the United States in 1935. 2. Giallo (yellow) is the name Italians gave to the whodunit genre. Differing theories explain the choice of the color yellow to tag detective stories. The one commonly accepted refers to the popularity of a series of whodunit novels published by Mondadori. Appearing in 1929, censored by the Fascist regime, and resurfacing in the immediate post-war years, all volumes in the series sported a trademark yellow cover. From the ’70s forward, the term giallo is used—mostly abroad and especially in English-speaking countries—in reference to a special brand of Italian murder mystery movies. 3. In 1960, under pressure of the Christian Democratic Party and on charges of obscenity, Fellini’s La Dolce Vita risked being seized and severely edited. Fellini jokingly commented on the episode with the short Le Tentazioni del Dottor Antonio in 1962. 4. A great admirer of Bava’s work, Fellini cast Barbara Steele in his Eight and a Half, as the alluring British girlfriend of Guido’s old friend, Mezzabotta. Fellini later quoted Bava again in his Toby Dammit by borrowing the image of the evil ball-bearing ghost girl from Operazione Paura. 5. EC Comics (of Tales from the Crypt and Mad fame) had a similar function in the United States in the mid-’50s, as its horror titles (with all the gore but none of the sex of their Italian successors) provoked a violent anti-comics crusade that changed the perception of the medium and opened the doors for the rise of underground comics a decade later. 6. Pratt authored two adaptations from Stevenson’s works: Treasure Island in 1964 and Kidnapped the following year. 7. In 1948, Italy began receiving full economic aid from the United States as part of the Marshall Plan. On March 20, 1948, a few weeks before the elections, George Marshall publicly declared that in the case of a Communist victory all financial help to Italy would have been suspended. 8. On March 28, 1948, Pope Pio XII warned Christians that “the time for Christian consciences to manifest themselves has come” and Cardinal Siri stated that it was mortal sin to vote for “lists and candidates who refuse to promise to respect God’s rights as well as those of the Church and the citizens.” (Ginsborg 154, 1989) 9. The term Zhdanovism takes its name from Andrei Zhdanov, a Soviet Central Committee Secretary who, in 1946, launched a campaign against any intellectual— including poets and novelists—whose works refused to conform to the Party lines. In Italy, the term was used to refer negatively to any censorship by the orthodox left-wing intelligentsia and the direction of the Party. Significantly, the first issue of Frigidaire (see 138 NOTES chapter 2), the comics magazine that in the early ’80s signaled the defeat of the cultural cold-war climate, included an article and unpublished poems by Anna Akhmatova, one of the first victims of Soviet Zhdanovism. 10. When Barbarella finally reappeared in the pages of Linus in 1967, the editors— worried about their readers’ reactions—cautiously used white-out to cover the heroine’s exposed nipples. Censorship was still a two-way street in Italy. 11. The Italian fumetti neri and vietati also had great success in France and most of them were faithfully reprinted (with a slight delay) by the publisher Elvifrance. 12. “In simple terms the story is the what in a narrative that is depicted, discourse the how.” (Chatman 19) 13. In the kaleidoscope of references that constitute one of the many discursive strategies of The Hermetic Garage (including cult science fiction author Michael Moorcock, Golden-Age American comics, Zen philosophy, French turn-of-the century popular culture), Moebius goes as far as quoting his own ’60s drawing style for the popular French character Blueberry by abruptly dropping his character in a western setting. An Italian artist who adopted Moebius’s eclectic strategies and made them his own was Andrea Pazienza—one of the leading artists of Italian new adult comics. 14. The title, the adventurist, sarcastically referred both to a term used by the orthodox supporters of the Communist Party to label comrades who would ideologically stray from the directives of the party, and to the popular comic book magazine of the ’30s, L’Avventuroso. CHAPTER TWO 1. One year later, Andrea Valcarenghi, editor-in-chief of Re Nudo, reconsidering the...