Every two years you’re here… you who don’t keep to schedules, commitments or appointments… why this zeal?
I’m already a total mess… I don’t work for months, all in all I toil maybe forty days… I don’t manage myself according to any rule… I can’t be my own agent and I hate anyone who wants to be… I’m incapable of making money, in fact I’m up to my neck in debt… If I don’t even come to Lucca, it’s a mess! Here, besides the comics fans, the losers looking for easy glory, the profiteroles (the ones who sleep and eat for free on other people’s coupons) and so on and so forth, there are publishers and agents from all over the world. And that’s a good thing, even if I understand little because nobody speaks Gargano dialect… Then in Lucca I meet lots of friends… Lucca is a firmament with constellations.
In this comics firmament there’s really everything, from the Great Bear, Hugo Pratt, to a newcomer, but you, with that always-out, stoned air of yours, seem the most loved of all…
I know few people and I forget names… I’m friends with the people at Frigidaire; my colleagues, like Tamburini, Liberatore, who’s doing so well that he’s going to live in Paris, Mattioli, Sparagna, and then Milo Manara, as good as gold but able to transform with alcohol (he gets honestly drunk)… then Bilal, handsome and pale like a Parisian Pole, Marcello Jori, the one from Linus…
This year everyone was in Lucca, except the aristocratic Crepax, the shy Altan, and Rocca, the owner of Nuova Frontiera, the one who flooded Italy with Totem, Pilot, Metal Hurlant and a ton of other publications, and who now seems to have been on the run for a few months, worryingly (above all for others)…
I don’t know anything about it… he doesn’t owe me anything and I don’t have any particular problems except the boredom that somewhat overcomes me in these three square meters of Lucca. The convention’s worst handicap is the obstacles to intimate acquaintance. Maybe a good discussion starts at the stands or at night in the lobby of the Hotel Napoleon, but then you don’t know where to wrap it up. Outside it’s cold and damp and the hotels are all packed, there are two, three people to a room at least. Apart from the couples, who are self-sufficient, there’s the division between women and men. Comics and adventure… but what adventure!?!
How come you’re among the best known in the world? And among the most loved by fans? Here, when they announced you’d be signing your Penthotal, people queued for hours…
It’s obvious… I’m good. I’ve disciplined an expressive disorder into mathematical-passionate foundations that allow me to convey any feeling, complete or not, beautiful or ugly, refined and careless, so that it appears to the reader as sincere and capable of persuading anyone of the profound truth that permeates my work, namely: I don’t give a damn about anything, about critics, readers or myself!
Yes… OK, but why are you so good?
Well… many people think I write and draw slapdash crap… I’d like to point out that I made my first recognizable drawing, a bear, at 18 months. I was an enfant prodige. I was the youngest artist ever to appear in the Bolaffi, back when you got in by acceptance and not by paying, I had seven solo exhibitions and countless group shows… I drew day and night…
Easy… Easy (Pazienza seems shaken)
“… day and night… I went to the art high school in Pescara… I studied art history for years… I worked in a screen-printing shop to learn all the techniques… I gave up so many things as a kid… then… only then, after many years, did I start making comics, in Bologna in ’77, to convey the anguish of those times… And what I publish is only the tip of an iceberg!”
Fine, but… let’s talk about the language of your comics (Pazienza is relaxing)
Yes… I invented a language… a blend of idioms from the Adriatic coast and Neapolitan slang. I feel like someone from the Gargano, from San Menaio, from San Severo, ‘the city of my thoughts, where the vine thrives and the winter is rather mild’. Did you know that the Gargano is an island of Slavic rock that attached itself to Italy to be populated by a colony of Neapolitans?
No… that’s news to me. So what is Naples to you?
(Pazienza lights up).
I have a strong bond with Naples. At a tender age I spent a lot of time in the parking lot in front of the Liceo Umberto. I had quite a few Neapolitan girlfriends and I loved them very much, because Neapolitan girls are treacherous and imaginative, rowdy and sexually uninhibited. Bolognese girls, for example, whom I now know well, having lived in Bologna for years, are didactic and in the end boring… Anyway, beyond these considerations, Naples is a bit like Marrakesh, a center of exchange, an international port… and despite the girls, I was always bored to death in Naples, as in every other city, for that matter
Like in Lucca?
… No, no… even more in Lucca!!!
