On Saturday, April 25, in Tuttolibri, the supplement to Stampa, Oreste del Buono wrote an article about the exhibition devoted to Andrea Pazienza, the (prematurely deceased) author of comics I would call “Célinian”, depicting a world of lost souls. Del Buono recalled the distant days of fifteen years ago, when Pazienza showed up at Linus with his drawings. Later, del Buono recalls, Pazienza claimed to have shown a fake letter of introduction from me, but he rules out that Pazienza did so. Let me make up for del Buono’s lapse of memory to restore historical truth. Pazienza was indeed a student at DAMS in Bologna, but I didn’t know him. At that time the official cartoonist of the degree course was Daniele Panebarco, who covered the corridors with large pages of Dracula-like stories set in a university in the Carpathians, where the villains were me and Professor Benedetto Marzullo. Pazienza came into my office one late afternoon (I’d say late 1975) and showed me his stories. I leafed through them quickly, but enough to realize the young man had talent. In his presence I phoned del Buono and asked if I could send him a young cartoonist. That’s how the story began. No fake letter. (…)