MATHEMATICS 1

For the umpteenth time they asked me “do you do invoices?”. I told them I’d let them know next week… These days I can’t draw. I go through periods when it comes very easily and others when it’s not easy at all, in the sense that the same old images keep coming back onto the paper and so I don’t have any fun. I lose any incentive. I can’t force myself, so I try to rekindle the dead fire of the desire to make things with systems. Basically, I’m looking for a mathematics in life that I don’t have. The mathematics I always hated, say, in middle school and so on, I’m looking for it now, partly because I like it. So I take breaks and read Lanciostory and Skorpio, or I start rereading 1984 from the beginning, which I’ve been trying to get past the first ten pages of for four years, and then I can’t, or I get high, with the system of the afternoon joint. The afternoon joint turns into a sort of Orlando struggling with gastric juices, with drowsiness and so on, so I gave it up. Yesterday I found some powder, which they gave me after months, and so, this morning, you see, I’ve got distilled water, lemon and so on, and I stayed like this… normal; normal? as normal as I can be… and nothing came out of it anyway. So now I’m worried too, I mean… (chuckles) I came to Alter in ’77 with those pages that were published. It wasn’t my very first work, but then I recycled all the pages, even the first ones, in the following stories, so in practice those were used too. Now everything’s much nicer, when there’s… when I feel like doing things, partly because almost nothing has changed, but not in the broad sense, as people say: “Yes, something has changed on the surface, but deep down I’m the same”. No, nothing has changed, not even on the surface. Nothing. Apart from certain considerations I’ve made, but which I’d have made anyway, about the scene, the people to hang out with… my life, the system for throwing it away…

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE

My work too… it’s all linked. There’s absolutely no public and private, I found myself thinking with a certain presumption. But it’s important that this presumption comes out too… in the sense that, in the end, what I do could be the tip of an iceberg of a whole series of upheavals I have… in the sense that I also like working with leather, building little statues, making my own belts, imagining all sorts of things, really… Comics are in any case an incredibly sincere way of expressing myself, in the sense that I’m my own first reader and I have to convince myself first of all. So I often make huge cock-ups, but I’m the first to recognize them – and I almost don’t mind drawing things I don’t like, or saying things I don’t believe in, but don’t believe in all the way, because then I believe in them enough, you know? – This gives me the chance to make up for it the next time, with greater, different commitment. But now I’d like to keep the cock-ups to a minimum so I can have fun. Partly because I’m almost convinced, also after talking to an old teacher of mine from the art high school in Pescara whom I saw again not long ago, after five or six years, who told me something I really believe in, namely that the only way to stick it to the people I don’t like for one reason or another, assuming I care, and deep down I do – while continuing to feel different and in fact underlining this difference – is to make worthwhile things, at least for me. At the root of all this there has to be a basic equation, namely that I do what I like… I don’t care about screwing up, I do exactly what I want. I struggle with a deep-seated laziness, in the sense that I very often exhaust what I’m interested in doing at the planning stage… because this laziness of mine stops me from winning that minimal battle that has to be fought to make something different… in the end I always fall back on doing comics and only that. I don’t hang out with anyone from the comics scene at all… I never talk about comics, I reward myself with friends who maybe work too, but are very much outside it; one is Nicola Corona, who doesn’t care at all about working, about doing, he’s very slow, he goes to work at the sugar factory, and yet he’s very good. And this also gives me the chance to think about what I do without too much influence from outside judgment. Rome is very different, as I think Milan would be too, but basically here in Bologna the situation makes me think more about doing things with others, for example performances, or running a theater space, or working on music. Right now I’m doing sets for a theater in Florence.

RECOGNIZING THE PROJECT

Comics are my temporary and periodic way of shutting myself away, into myself too, certainly, to work on a series of materials I’ve unconsciously found and pigeonholed. Now I almost find myself playing with my powers of retention… there are times when I look at a building, because I think it might come in handy, with a slightly different eye, and I look at all of it without dwelling on anything, because I don’t know what I’ll need from that building later. Before, everything was much more unconscious; now I get much more hooked on the functionality of things, of elements, on why an object is made one way rather than another, and this has greatly widened what was at first the limit that came from my being left-wing, because even though I look at communism as something to be avoided at all costs, and even though I have no other real reference points, I can say I am, or was, left-wing by constitution…; this also set limits for me; now I look at everything a great deal and I manage to appreciate everything a great deal. Maybe also because I live in a situation of objective discomfort that helps me, that makes me very sensitive. And so I look at objects, things, cars, houses, especially if they’re beautiful, with a different eye, the eye of someone who recognizes the project. The eye of someone who, beyond the element, the color, the functionality created and now operating, looks at what’s behind these things… When I started this sort of revolution, last year, before leaving for the US, because I went to America precisely because I was looking for this ’80s sign, but that’s a concept I may not repeat, because in fact it was important for me, but it can be important for anyone to go there… When I came back, a year ago, this widening led me to take an interest even in things that aren’t historically interesting, a dispersion of interests, if you like, toward a whole series of things, so even music I don’t like, that I didn’t like, I started to look at with a different eye, because I’d say, well yes, but even there… punk too has an initial project and serves some purpose, so it’s interesting to discover that too. So I no longer felt disgusted a priori. Now, though, after this perhaps excessive widening, I’m closing up again. But I’ve excluded a whole series of things and acquired others.

POSSIBILITY

Now I’d like to talk about two comics projects. One is Giallo scolastico and the other is Pacco. Behind these two comics there is in fact a project, and since I noticed people talked about it, in Manifestofor example, about Giallo scolastico, in terms of a film, with a review I didn’t understand, which I liked because it talked about it as a film, and it was a film I was interested in making. Pacco differs from Giallo scolastico, first of all because the characters that in Giallo scolastico I was interested in outlining now start from established premises and move on. Then the atmospheres change. This one was made the way Godard shot A bout de souffle, live, on what was happening, and then I worked on something that really happened to me, whereas all the other comics are a collage of things that happened to me or to others, or that I imagined could happen. At the root of this kind of work – which in its design differs enormously from what a work of science fiction or classic crime fiction might be, in which a series of weapons, a series of codes are used – there’s a possibilist hypothesis: all this can happen as a matter of normality, without the need for a catastrophic, subliminal event in the background, or one that lasts throughout the comic. What happened is that after doing Giallo scolastico, which I also like because at its root there’s a whole exercise in writing for comics, minimal because a comic is almost a radio adaptation of a novel, compared with what a film could be, etc.; it’s a moment of reduction, (I understood that, ed.) in Giallo scolastico the possibilist hypothesis was taken to its extreme consequences. Because the characters were taking shape in a certain way: in practice there’s a quantity of things unsaid and things said, in which the things unsaid far outnumber the things said. In the sense that Pacco was born from a question I had asked a friend of mine. I had drawn Zanardi’s black Golf GT 1600 diesel. Then I asked a friend: “what car do you think Zanardi might have?”, and after thinking about it he answered a black diesel Golf. That blew my mind. In fact, he couldn’t have any other car. Because Zanardi, Petrilli and Colasanti – you sense it between the lines, you read their whole declared background, but not explicitly: from certain details, in the drawing, in the expressions, in the faces, from certain elements of the script… so of Zanardi I can say that his father isn’t rich, but well-off, and that in any case he’s an only child, which allows him to have a car like that. Zanardi’s main characteristic is emptiness. The absolute emptiness that permeates his every action. Basically Zanardi represents what I hated most in the behavior of someone I knew in my childhood. Colas, on the other hand, is certainly rich, and everything he does is mediated by his wealth. He’s a hustler and nobody knows why he does it, but he manages to do it in a certain way; in practice he grants himself the possibility of choosing on the basis of his wealth. You could even reach conclusions like: where they live, what they do. Petrilli, on the other hand, is a frustrated guy who won’t give up a certain kind of game with the others, he’s completely under their influence, he can’t afford it, because physically he’s the way he is, because he has the family he has.

Petrilli is the one who burns the Volkswagen in a page of Male?
Yes, but not even, he’s not that bad, deep down he’s not even capable of that kind of resolve. He’s capable of giving tips. He says: look, that’s the janitor’s daughter, but then he keeps his distance, maybe he doesn’t even enjoy himself; anyway he’s certainly the most intelligent, the least empty of the three. The substantial difference between Colasanti and Zanardi is that, although they hang out together, they’re both alone; they’re two lone wolves who, precisely because of their “difference”, find themselves almost forced to hang out together and to go their way together. “I’m a wolf, don’t call me Fido”. In Pacco, I had to come up with a “summery” line that wasn’t sloppy, in the sense that I drew it in very precarious conditions too, even more precarious than here, where at least I have a table and a chair… All that was left for me was to do an exercise in writing. When this Maurizio pops up, this guy from “Near Padua”, in outlining this figure I drew on a whole series of mental, mnemonic participations I’d had in my childhood… me, first-hand, or things I read in others even more hapless than me. I made a collage of bad luck and out came this Maurizio, who crudely lives everything he’s allowed, drugs, camping, chicks and so on, but always with this Catholic, disgusting, pregnant manner that leads him to vouch… he does quizzes about animals… that’s how it is…

AT A CERTAIN POINT, ALL THE DIALOGUE STOPS

I find it much easier to draw empty pages than pages full of dialogue like these, because it requires the character to act out what he’s saying… this is something I learned at Male, that the face of whoever is speaking, in the back-and-forth, has to follow the expression of the whole dialogue, supporting both what is said at the beginning and the final punchline, because there is also a mathematics to reading certain things. Of course, in a small cartoon everything is very compressed, it’s hard… whereas free pages are pure drawing and off you go. What happens is that at a certain point the dialogue stops. He says: “well, I don’t think I’ve forgotten anything… I can go”, and he takes this trip that ends with “Zanna hits the hanged man on the head with a brick”; I really like this empty ending, white as madness, because in fact at that moment he isn’t thinking about anything and isn’t resolved to do absolutely anything other than go and hit him on the head with a brick. He knows perfectly well how the whole story will end: is he creating a diversion, something to do? No, in practice he lets fate take its course, but what kind of fate is it if he already foresaw it? At a certain point, this possibility of playing with his own fate, by promoting an absolutely elementary physical action, paying 30,000 lire for it, he knows perfectly well that the guy will leave. What’s more, he has nothing against the guy who sold him the dud, he’s much angrier with the others, who give the tent number to the campsite warden… And he leaves, goes to San Severo, sees the guy and chases him. The writing breaks down here, I’m almost afraid to write; in fact, the lettering is broken lettering, done almost with my left hand. In these last two panels I wanted to write… but then this happened to me and so I also had a moment of delirium regarding, I mean. It’s incredible! The comic, Zanardi caught up with me before I could finish the story. But at that point the story seemed so excessive to me, so full of consequences, legal ones too, for Zanardi, who instead keeps well out of things like that, that I chose the brick, an element that doesn’t cut, capable of hurting a lot, but not of killing. In these last two panels I wanted to write: Zanardi hits that guy on the head with a brick, unlike what you would have done, what you the reader would have done. You can decide to hurt someone, but at the moment of doing it, with total premeditation, without any premise at all except having lost some money, with no hope of getting it back, this striking and that’s it. It’s completely inexplicable, even though it’s the first thing that comes to mind: the person who got the dud wants to find the guy and make him pay…

…there isn’t even the pleasure of action.
But he does it. And why does he do it? That’s what I couldn’t explain to myself. So, concentrating hard to get into what might be Zanardi’s psychology, I came to the conclusion that he isn’t thinking about anything at all. It’s the emptiness that permeates him, that surrounds him, only emptiness. The dynamics of the trip that pushes him to pass through San Severo and do what he does. He plays his cards almost with total desperation, almost realizing this emptiness. In short, the character outgrew the author: when I got to the last two panels I realized I’d been playing with a character perhaps bigger than me. In such a way that it was hard for me to explain his actions.

Well, the immediate answer to the question why does Zanardi do this is: because he’s Zanardi. If you want to look for further motives, you can say he’s a sort of demon of the readers’ unconscious, he does what you’d like to do but never do.
And he’s also what you’d hate immediately, at first sight. But I realized that he certainly can’t be considered an active hero, but not an anti-hero either. He escapes these definitions: and for the first time since I’ve been drawing I realize I’m dealing with a character of enormous depth due to this emptiness, which is also a limit at the planning stage and during the work, in the sense that it’s not an emptiness to be filled but to be kept as it is. The funny thing is that in Pacco the collective unconscious ends up being forced to identify with this buck-toothed guy (Maurizio, the one from “Near Padua”, ed.) who does quizzes about hamsters and vouches. At a certain point, though, the discourse breaks off and this emptiness is rendered graphically and through a series of moments. These panels are all thought out, after all, even if apparently they’re… no, I wouldn’t say sloppy, they have a “summery” line.

THE COMICS METHOD

What amazed me was the sequential rigidity of Pacco…I mean, the panels are all the same size and every page has the same number of panels. It almost seems like a specific reference to a cinema screen.
That’s the point… another point. It’s the point of the module. I mean, at a certain point I realized I had a series of styles at my disposal. After these years of work I now tend to step out of what comics dictate rather than fossilize in a line that may be high quality but is very identifiable. The further I go, the more I tend to shake off the sense of the comics line. So, instead of an implosion, that is all the styles converging in one place, or lots of drawings with elements in common, recognizability, I decided to go for an explosion, to distribute the quality of the line across a series of possibilities, each different from the other, and to exaggerate these differences, almost as an exercise.

In what sense?
In the sense that, say, in an eye drawn in one story and in an eye drawn in another context or story by the same artist you can find similarities. The artist draws eight different eyes and in the end they all look alike. Let me give an example: Magnus. Magnus has an unmistakable line, of course, but in all his stories he was recognizable also because at the base of the eyes, and it’s just an example, he always made the same movement, that is, folds broken in the middle, as if they had a central luminosity dividing the line of the lower eyelid. And that’s a sign of recognition. Or, another example, when you draw hands: every artist draws hands in a certain way, they can differ from one another, but basically… like Breccia, for example, or lots of others. When you don’t work in these terms you become an illustrator. Now, I’m not an illustrator… not that I… but that’s not my case, that’s all. But it’s precisely on this kind of difference that I want to work. To accentuate these differences. To work with different materials, posing to myself each time, moment by moment, instant by instant, even centimeter by centimeter, millimeter of line by millimeter of line, the problem of the difference from the line used in other circumstances, so as to have an infinite or nearly infinite range, or at any rate a multiplicity of lines very different from one another. To be used in a series of circumstances.

MATHEMATICS 2

So the explosion you were hypothesizing… the connection between the center and the various outer poles is more mathematical than graphic, there’s no connecting hyphen, it’s a logical and methodological matter.
Yes. When this nova has exploded I’ll be able to reach these satellites each time… open a room and say here, here’s everything I need for this thing I’m doing now. Mathematics, of course: in practice I want to rediscover the mathematics I lacked at the beginning. And this absence, after all, allowed me to make Pentothal but now I absolutely have to move away from it. This whole story, all these things I’ve said, can be traced back to a much simpler equation expressing the division between two kinds of feeling: that is, Pentothal on one side and Zanardi on the other. Then, of course, there are other possibilities, there’s the moment of color, the moment of a certain kind of story, the science-fiction exercise, assuming I want to do it and do it, and so on. But first of all this difference: Pentothal on one side and Zanardi on the other. What was there before Zanardi: Pentothal on one side and on the other the condition… this buck-toothed character who appears in Pacco is basically its graphic expression. Which corresponds to the tip of Mickey Mouse’s sideburn. I mean, they’re basically the kids whose sideburns are still fuzz, who ring the church bell, the kids still in the phase of growing a mustache, with lots of baggage they seem never to be able to free themselves from, from now to eternity.

The mental pimple…
…exactly, the mental pimple. When I was drawing Pentothal… This condition that made me feel liquid, stupid, brutish in my kowtowing, all a noise of clicking heels; recognition of the… false modesty… recognition of strength in others; constantly admitting that you’re stronger than me, you know?; constantly prostrating myself, almost the condition of being a girl’s confidant… in a class there are the boys who act like boys, then at worst they bugger each other in the toilets. And then there’s this in-between figure, the figure of the girls’ confidant. The one who doesn’t do anything with the girls, but hangs around them, studies with them and is hated by all the others. I was never like that, but maybe it was my hidden danger. Partly because when I was at high school I was two years younger than the others, and four years younger mentally than the more streetwise kids in Pescara. I came from a small town. Pentothal, on the other hand, was the wooden, bony, vital condition, with a mustache. Much more macho. Maybe less intelligent, less sensitive than the other one, which instead reveals and requires a lot of sensitivity. Pentothal is a more centralizing, almost totemic, muscular, dynamic figure. Someone who in practice moves with his brain through a series of normal, ordinary parameters, but who with dreams, and specifically in the oneiric, ranges in… with… an absolutely non-possibilist comic, in fact the comic of the impossible. Full of grievances, crammed after all with populist indifference too, even if set within a certain sector… so highly debatable… but above all Pentothal was friendship, the almost homosexual relationship with a friend, the moment of woman lived in terms of affection, and basically of simplicity too. So lots of beautiful things in which I liked to recognize myself. But honestly I, as a person, never belonged either to the first condition, because I very often recognized it in others whom I hated, or to the second. The first, then, was erased. The second… what emerges from the Pentothal stories is that they don’t stand the test of time, except as a document, and that doesn’t interest me. And they don’t stand the test of time because they’re monstrously naive, they’re full not so much of inaccuracies as of linguistic and rhetorical naivety.

There’s a flood of a priori assumptions
Yes. Custer… a whole series of clichés that are a bit naive to bring up. Today, at least, it would be impossible. (break)

ROCK

(These conditions, ed.) have in any case been replaced by another, which is rock, which is Zanardi. Now I won’t talk about Zanardi anymore; instead I’ll talk about this rock business. I’ve decided to be rock, like Mick Jagger, and I’ll move in that direction from now to eternity. I mean, I have no desire whatsoever to grow old in any sense, including the physical one. And a great desire instead to move through a whole series of channels that are absolutely not the ones established by law, so not television, show business and so on. For my own amusement, I’d be interested in moving as an exercise, each time grappling with something different. In the sense that I enjoy the idea of being able to do violence to myself by forcing myself to take an interest in things I wouldn’t arrive at instinctively. Deciding to do a comic in a certain way: saying now I’m going to do a science-fiction comic, let’s see, through me. I mean, I filter it, but playing it by the book, with all the typical places, typical angles through which one looks at a certain kind of operation. Like saying now I’ll do an operation on poetry. It’s a bit like what Barthes did; I don’t like Barthes, but anyway he did very strange things, he wrote little and about everything, very strange things. He was interested in moving as an exercise, wasting a lot of time and acquiring certain knowledge, too.

This is a Zen kind of operation. I say Zen because it reminds me of the operation underlying that book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.
Exactly, yes.

Now a slightly absurd question. Does it make sense that this Pentothal, virile and mustached, in a certain sense the other part, later reappears first in the Nameless Detective and then in Lieutenant Stella?
There are moments of connection, sure. And moments of brutalization. I mean, I brutalize a figure that risks becoming stupid in its granite… in its granite and highly predictable movement. It’s a sort of line moving on parallel tracks: and so there’s the moment of the absurd in which I move in a completely absurd way. And there’s the possibilist moment pushed to the extreme. I mean, I discard a whole series of non-possibilist hypotheses to end up doing something that’s as possible as possible.

That’s perhaps the only possible key to reading Aficionados, in fact.
Did you like Aficionados?

Mmmyes, it didn’t thrill me but I liked it, maybe for reasons outside the comic itself…
There’s an important consideration to make about Aficionados… there are moments when it’s easy for me to explain myself, maybe because I’m high and I rattle off one sentence after another, moments when it’s harder, maybe because I think about it a moment longer… anyway, that’s it. The exercise in writing that I’m doing, because I’m doing it, I’m doing loads of exercises, I don’t know if that comes across.

It’s the most exciting thing. The study of the fracture and recomposition of language. Not a Zavattini-style live capture of speech, but a distortion that becomes hyperrealist. I don’t know, even in things like Anco Marzio and all the stories of that kind.
There’s that too. That was a very big job. Anyway, everything has to be traced back to the idea of limits, of a very limited game that I carry within me. I’m talking about the difficulties an amateur encounters in building a ship in a bottle: something others can’t do, but that’s not important. But I want to do it, and each time I set myself greater difficulties, improving myself and improving the mechanism. Even if the results aren’t those of a perfectionist. Because it’s not the result I’m interested in… extreme case: if I screw something up, I give myself the chance to make up for it the next time, angrily but absolutely without remorse. It’s the only thing that makes me do everything: the act of climbing the mountain, not the summit. Now, making comics also means finding a text, finding a story, someone to write a story, and drawing it. Unfortunately, I can’t draw from other people’s scripts, precisely for the reasons you can imagine. It could be an exercise, but I can’t make characters perform speaking with someone else’s voice, precisely because I’m doing exercises on language, on speech. The originals of Pacco are full of patches. Even though the line is sloppy, there are countless patches, one on top of another, because I change the outlines of the eyes, I alter the expressions letter by letter, so to speak. They go together letter by letter. I repeat, it’s not the results that interest me, but the way I get to satisfy myself… What I understand while doing a story doesn’t help me with the next one, because I start from premises that are almost always opposite: a very rhythmic story, say, I usually follow with a very liberating graphic jam.

EVOCATION

Now, in Aficionados, the exercise was on just one sentence. The whole story came out of this exercise on one sentence. And the sentence was: “Francesco Stella, former tennis coach from Livorno, commanded his men with a tennis player’s verve”. Why did everything come out of this sentence? This sentence, or rather this equation, because that’s basically what it is, conceals the admirable process, the marvelous process of evocation. The mechanism of evocation, which Pratt knows very well and is a master of, consists in recreating… and Paolo Conte too… but mine is something a bit different from Hugo’s… even if then in Stella, who isn’t called that by chance, just as he uses Shanghai Lil, not by chance… now, evocation sets in when nouns replace adjectives, the adjectivization of the noun, in short, and to define a situation I no longer use the adjective but the noun. I don’t explain what Stella is like through adjectives, I explain it through nouns. Stella is a tennis coach from Livorno in the ’30s. What it meant to be a tennis coach in a city like Livorno in 1930 I can only imagine, and hope that others imagine too.

Forte dei Marmi, Virginia Agnelli, Malaparte…
… a sweater with a thin red and blue stripe, yes, and a whole range of possibilities.

Above all, lousy tennis.
Above all lousy tennis, certainly, seaside and non-competitive. Above all, competing with nothing. Doing a story about evocation… sometimes doing stories like this means boiling down to a sentence, like the professor’s in Giallo scolastico who says to Colasanti “I’ve fallen in love with you and it’s stupid of me to say so”. It’s also stupid of me to write it, but it’s so stupid of me to write about a professor falling in love with his student that everything becomes not only evocation but also possible. In what terms can a university professor, a former ’68er, claim his right to fall in love with a hustler? Only in these terms of stupidity. Accentuating this stupidity makes everything possible, there’s nothing else. Evocation arises when you stop to consider a series of aspects that arise from a problem. Anyway, it all comes back to what I said before, moving so as to tell things in terms of nouns, not adjectives. It’s exactly the opposite operation to expanding the meaning of things, moving on different levels, saying many things, telling a lot, writing a lot, setting in motion a whole series of circumstances to arrive at the meaning of the thing. That requires many adjectives, a wide range of adjectives. Evocation, instead, arises from the reverse process, from putting together words in common use, from a reduction of the meaning of the sentence and of the very length of the sentence in question.

But from the point of view of evocation Aficionados comes across as a bit throwaway, predictable.
I didn’t like it. I mean, there are things I may like, but without being fully satisfied, including the color, which wasn’t mine. In any case, it all comes down to the fact that I got it wrong by using a good initial idea and carrying it out quickly and badly. Now, these short timescales, and having done it badly, no longer fit the line of Pacco which is studied even if it’s fluttery. But the line is just sloppy, and that’s it; I got it wrong because the exercise was minimal, absolutely. I wasted a good idea, the journey, because I didn’t develop it, because I fell back on a series of rather predictable jokes and gags. And then I totally, cosmically blew the ending. I say it without any violence: I do what I like and I do what I like. You realize you’re putting this “I do what I like” into practice when you do ugly things, not when you do beautiful things. It’s basically the hidden satisfaction that comes from absolute non-concern. It’s a kind of gratification, after all: non-concern is beautiful. It also comes from the fact that a comic isn’t a film, it doesn’t involve too many people, it doesn’t require the commitment of a film, money, expenses, budgets… and then because those few smiles I manage to raise, if I manage, are worth the 2,500 lire of the book, compared with what films offer you, Frigidaire, L’Espresso, Alter… it’s not something worse, you know? and to all this I add absolute non-concern for image and the claim to be able to make up for it later… in a sense I’m already thinking about what I’ll do next… from this comes a sort of calm that I think can be passed on from the page to the reader. I’m calm, and I think this naturalness can come through.

Right. Because according to Luigi Bernardi of Isola Trovata, Aficionados is your best thing…
Well, it was just something functional to my progress… Anyway, it’s not an absence of concern that comes from self-assurance, it has nothing to do with that. It’s exactly the opposite: this non-concern that comes from doing what I like stems from the awareness that everything is very fleeting. You’re not writing History, no History is being written. At the only talk I’ve ever given, in Modena, invited by the city council, in a bookshop… I was quite tense, and the first question they asked me was why I do serialized stories and don’t continue them. (…) The first thing that came to mind, which I did think about, though, is that I do what I like. Exactly what I like. I don’t even ask myself about continuity, but not out of lack of respect for… but because I simply don’t think about the reader. I mean, I don’t think of the reader as a judging entity who pays and wants to get certain things. After all, and this is why my work is very circumscribed, there aren’t many readers, and I’m talking to friends. To the aficionados: but they’re my aficionados, and I’m their aficionado. Really. I truly am, since I’m here, now, and when I go out I realize I’m not caught in any machinery. I’m absolutely free, and it’s not a freedom I’ve won but a freedom I’ve kept.

(…) THE 3X7 MODULE

Muñoz used to say that a comic is born when it’s printed, when it’s thrown to the public…
No. I completely agree with… I think with Joyce, a piece centered on a woman, the figure of a woman…

Molly Bloom. The Penelope episode.
Exactly. Basically he says you have to get rid of your work the way you get rid of your toenails. I read it and said I completely agree with this guy. What interests me is everything that comes before. The planning stage, the setup… in Giallo scolastico, just to underline the dichotomy between Pentothal and this new rock hypothesis I’ve devoted myself to… as far as a certain area is concerned, my right side, not in the political sense… or rather, my left side in the “sinister” sense… in the first rock story, Notte… no, Giorno, I wanted to do Notte (Night) but then I chose Giorno (Day) because it’s hallucinatory… I was recently on the Gargano, there was an incredible pop September light, the asphalt reflected, the trees reflected, there were no more foregrounds, middle grounds and backgrounds, everything was in 3D like a View-Master… so this fascination with the day that I obviously feel strongly… but not days like that, bright days… or not… anyway, the problem was creating a module for myself. I mean: how could I limit myself? how could I create an obstacle course for myself? I have these 100 meters to do and I can run them and come out with something drawn and written, or I can put obstacles in the way. One of the obstacles was the module. I mean, I invented a module calculator in hand, moving in an incredible way through the mathematics I don’t know, but calculator in hand, with mystical references to measurement… I mean, what’s the measure, why this millimeter more or less… and I came up with a module. Banal, 3 x 7. I got there through incredible processes and in the story it pops up everywhere, I draw it, I quote it, I point it out, tiles and pictures in that module… from the sum of these modules I get the panels. 2 modules horizontally, two vertically, four in a row, and out come the panels, the space to draw on. In Pacco, the module is different, summery and much easier to get past. Exactly the opposite of Pentothal. (Andrea pulls out the written draft of the new story for Alter) Title: Big commemorative comic for my 25th birthday. I’m commemorating this fact. “I don’t want to fucking grow old” “if I strain my arm the deltoid gets stretch marks…” they’re all sentences like that. Of all this I’ve now kept only “Now tell me if I’ll ever be thirty and if, on the brink of 26, I’m wrong not to run away” “now look at me with my friends. Among them I’m a young punk and I say crappy chair, big butt, terrace, and I’m wicked”. I don’t believe in distinctions between acquaintance, friend, brother… they’re Camorra-like, mafia-like… but maybe here it works: “but then with my brothers I shrug my shoulders, we forgive each other, we’re kids”. I mean, I can no longer stand not being forgiven for what I do, the way I used to be. Since I haven’t changed because I’m prevented from changing (glance at the room, ed.). I demand to be forgiven the way the older kids used to forgive me when I broke their arms doing fake exercises in…; ooh, I’ve broken arms, made messes, wrecked cars, set vans on fire, I’ve done terrible things, and now I wouldn’t be forgiven anymore, now people would say “ooooh, the van, nine hundred thousand lire” and they’d want it back. “I’m Pazienza, a name as stupid as a disease” now how do you write a sentence like that without people… it’s dangerous, it could be dangerous. Let’s go on. The Manual of the Dictatorship of Repentance is something I wrote this summer. It’s all very difficult, because all my moving about is marked… is dictated by a… continuous repentance.

Ah, so you’re like the guy in the page from Male, the one with cherries in his ears…
Exactly, yes, exactly! I want to be punished, take me back, I want to go to school… “The Manual of the Dictatorship of Repentance converts me to the horror of having to spend a night of repentance, and so I decide to take remedial action by giving her – a person says this – by giving her this marvelous antique 8-carat gold jewel that belonged to my grandmother. Being a medal of some value, bearing on side A a gold bas-relief, but flat, that is an engraving, depicting an archer whose torso is grafted onto the body of a horse, in place of what in reality would have been the beast’s equine neck, and under this allegory the inscription: Sagittarius, and on side B an inscription in cursive, ‘Renata’, and a date, 11.2.61. With this gift jewel I will redeem my love with her”. This can be traced back to the equation according to which 3 million a month isn’t enough for a truly rich man to pay his secretary, but a gold jewel, being gold and offering guarantees for speculation… “The Manual of the Dictatorship of Repentance says I’m a python but doesn’t specify what kind”. And this is the python (shows the drawing, ed., very sad). “If I were a python I’d be amazed – Roman style – and I’d stay amazed like that forever. How many things I’d miss: fingers, jackets, screwing, eating. And as an idea, crawling, crawling, lit by a neon light under glass in the middle of a deserted countryside. What a drag, I don’t want to think about it” I won’t write that, though. It’s just a moment of… “And I haven’t learned anything, about anything” “a page white as madness” “I get by on a razor’s edge”. I won’t get anything out of all this, but the meaning may lie in this panel, the game, in a story like this in which I commemorate my 25 years with a pomposity that isn’t mine, because I don’t even remember it, my birthday, it’s just a matter of taking advantage of a strange situation that allows me, by handling the panel, the figure, the page and above all what I say in a certain way, to entertain and win sympathy rather than horrify people who think, but this guy, oh, what the fuck is he saying… “what a flat and rambling game, and it’s been done before” They’re banalities, let me say up front, “now you think. Thank you: after I’ve given you the cue. Now I’m tired and repentant, I’d like to stay turned away and forget about you. With a grimace of pain, and in my little pajamas, turned toward the wall while the guests slowly leave and in the room someone turns off the lights. My love” Black page “love of a dead young lady”. This, on the other hand, is the continuation of the nameless detective. The ND… now I’m doing an incredible adventure, 25 pages, AND I’M FINISHING IT. Only the premises of the first story… I didn’t like it, you couldn’t tell whether the drawing was the caption of the story or vice versa… all these sheets are preparation for the story. Now I’m interested in linking everything I’m doing, drawn in a different way, to what I did before. (Paz’s sheets, ed.) Can I give you an idea to pass on to some artist? An American billionaire decides to commemorate himself; he takes a Jumbo, or something even bigger, empties it completely and gets it ready for a huge party. Shows, there’s everything, the swimming pool… while flying. At a particularly difficult moment in international politics, like now, he invites all the heads of state, the party secretaries of the great powers, of the oil-producing countries, of the developing countries, to this party, and they all put their business aside and gather, in the name of pure fun. This billionaire flies around the world several times, refueling in flight for this very long party, and then the climax: he calls them all together and drops an atomic bomb on Berlin. Which is a bit like hitting all the nations at once. From here come all the speculations about these people made accomplices by this situation. He says now let’s kick off the Third World War, and he drops this atomic bomb.

It wouldn’t break out because they’d all be jointly responsible… they’d come to an agreement.It would be a third world war breaking out by popular acclaim and not by politicians’ decisions…

Isn’t the people always better than its rulers?
No, no. My father keeps going on at me with the story that democracy doesn’t exist because just because these people are more numerous doesn’t mean they should be in charge… for years I’ve been blowing up when he tells me that, without being able to settle it except with wisecracks… I usually say tell me who the Speaker of the Chamber is. He doesn’t know, and I go “ahahahh!”, and leave.