What do comics mean to you?
Well, that’s a question that, without risk of rhetoric, is rather difficult to answer, at least as far as I’m concerned; comics are a very important thing… but not the most important. At the moment, for example, I’m thinking a lot about what I do, and I’m becoming more and more mystical from this point of view, in spite of those who see me as a superficial, multifaceted and changeable person, to put it kindly. Instead I’m thinking a great deal, and I’m thinking that there are underlying mathematics in everything, governing everything that later becomes a project and only in the end a realization. I’d like to be one of those people who “think” this mathematics and don’t let themselves be led astray by the hand that runs on. And instead… instead I’m not making the effort.
I’m making an effort to be pedantic and schoolish and unrecognizable, and provocative to the death, and above all to have fun. Comics come from subcultures: that of the illustrated feuilleton, of the bad fairy tale that needs pictures in order to be somehow absorbed, especially and clearly by a young audience. Instead it would be nice to be able to extract this form, so reduced at the moment, and turn it into something else. There are people doing it, and I’d like to be among them, but then, after all, I’m not doing it, and maybe not even those who say they are… I mean, for every word I answer myself with another five hundred that tell me “that’s not true, there isn’t just one truth” – it’s clear, isn’t it? – so I could end up saying that Walter Molino is my master… and signing it a second time. And instead, well, there are timescales, there’s the need to close the issue, there are deadlines… which are mind-boggling, because making something beautiful that has a duration, timing, underlying mathematics in a comic isn’t like doing the same thing in a film, because you have much less time. The timescales shrink to a few weeks, sometimes even less, if you’re someone who has decided to live a life too… away from the drawing table… I spend most of my time away from the table. The timescales are what they are. The mathematics go to hell. We’d need to overturn at the root the order that governs the production and distribution of comics and create new areas of quality; and these areas of quality – I’m not ashamed to say it – are created with money, by giving young and not-so-young people, all the cartoonists who are worth something, the chance to adapt to the new demands of a postmodern life and to have enough money to be able to work more calmly. What does this mean? It basically means that if a Transavanguardia painting that costs sixty million is rightly bought for that sum, I can’t understand why a page of mine should still cost 120 thousand lire. The point is that at a certain point you realize you’re moving a business and feeding too many sharks. I feel like The Old Man and the Sea: I’m heading back to port and I’ve tied my catch to the hull of my boat, but before I manage to leave the skeleton on the sand, the sharks have stripped it all, reducing it to a skeleton, precisely. So what? You make do when small businesses are involved, you’re helped by enthusiasm; now the enthusiasm is there, and there’s plenty of it, but the business has become big, and I still refuse to believe that everyone can make a living from comics except the cartoonists. A phrase that is invariably repeated to all young cartoonists when they show up at the editorial offices of magazines, including Frigidaire. So what?!! What kind of story is that? I fight, guys, I’m not stingy, I fight, you know? and I give hell to whoever bothers me on these grounds. I believe that mathematics governs part of our lives; I’m also convinced that there are mathematics capable of governing our soul, that is, inner mathematics that give meaning to the gesture. This lesser dispersion of energy, this greater concentration on what’s important, can give us happiness. There, I believe mathematics is important and I’d like to refer to mathematical models, but the hand follows its own mathematics; sometimes they’re mathematics of disengagement, sometimes they’re non-mathematical mathematics, and sometimes the mind wavers, and… and moves through unknown limbos, and this mathematics goes out the window, dear friends… But mathematics is important. As far as research is concerned, I think that if I could give the right meaning to every gesture I make on a sheet of paper, and to every line corresponding to that gesture, the line would come off the page and come and talk to you. Sometimes I’m guilty of presumption, but I know my limits perfectly well, because I’m sustained by a conviction, that of being at the beginning. I’d like always to be at the beginning, that is, to think that everything I’ve managed to do has no importance… and that’s why I’d like pure research, and that’s why I don’t feel like a cartoonist, and that’s why I’m not interested in opinions and not interested in answering letters in magazines, and why instead I’m more interested in being a rocker and living a rocker’s life for as long as it interests me, and you can’t waste more time than that on it; you need long evolutionary timescales, even if compared with other people’s they seem very fast.

When you create one of your pages, how do you proceed? Normally you start from a story idea, then move on to the script and then to the drawing. It’s a method used by pretty much all your colleagues; do you do the same?
I discovered only recently that I have a second option, and I’ll tell you about it. First, though, I’ll talk about the only one I’ve used so far, which was to throw down pencil drawings in a notebook, on which I make marks, it looks like writing… they’re almost a cryptogram, I think I’m the only one who can understand them; it’s complete writing, I’d say, done in one burst. I’ll refer to those drawings enormously later on, because they’re the first things that come to mind, the ones that come from my film culture, from my desire to tell stories, from my true essence. Then I create a grid, which, when things go well, corresponds to a module. This module varies; the one I used for Giorno and Verde matematico is 7×3.5. Then I have another half measure that I use in addition to this initial module… it helps me enlarge the page by an amount that isn’t proportional to the rest of the measurements, and gives movement to the page itself. So I divide it into four parts with vertical and horizontal lines. Of the four stacked strips, only two can be enlarged at will; the other two stay the same, so they follow the module. Then I build the story, adding a great deal but still keeping the original idea. Recently, with Verde matematico, I found myself with only ten good pages (out of sixteen) of script to follow; I had started doing it, then I wasn’t at all happy with the last part and the ending, so I shut myself in my room, down in Apulia, sat down at a table, and for the first time in my life, without a single idea in my head and without any kind of inspiration and with the heaviest heart in the world, I set about working with my head alone… I worked with my head, and out came a confusion I like very much, regardless of what you may think of it. And I was happy because that way I found the second solution, that is, there’s also a solution that’s sometimes almost purely mathematical. You have to deeply understand the psychology of the character you’re drawing, dress him in a certain way, give him this or that imprint, make him say the lines that count, playing on ambiguity and, above all, starting from the assumption that you’re talking to people who know the language. It’s a particular kind of writing, I think, with a series of repetitions and commas and no periods, or final dashes or exclamation marks that are sometimes a dialect inflection or dialect, that’s all. Whereas when I draw freehand, I work as if I were on a glider, I go easy, loose, relaxed, letting myself be carried by the pencil as if it were the wind.

Now let’s talk about your most successful characters: Zanardi, Petrilli and Colasanti. The personalities of all three are so well defined that they almost seem to really exist.
Zanardi exists to the point that I’d have no trouble finding him and taking his photo, because in my opinion Zanardi is the person we all know, without that turning him into a stereotype. Sometimes he’s our guilty conscience, but here I’d become too banal if I went on talking about one of my characters in these terms, which are historical terms. Zanardi is a friend of mine, but he’s also the bad deed of each of us. Zanardi lives on false certainties, agreed, but is owning a Renault dealership downtown a false certainty? Knowing you’ll inherit it, what is that if not security? The characters, when I draw them, especially in Giallo scolastico and Verde matematico, have their own raw consistency, because the line distinguishes them panel by panel, and yet they’re always themselves, and they’re what their soul is at the moment the action takes place. They’re the sleepless nights they spent before arriving at this story I’m telling, without my saying so… they’re all the experiences they’ve lived through in the last few months… and they’re their youthful shocks, their childhood traumas… It’s a whole combination of things that meant that when I asked a friend: “What car might Zanardi have?”, and I’d already written it, he said: “A black 1600 diesel Golf Cabriolet”. And it was true, it was Zanardi’s car. We know he’s an only child, but he’s “THE” only child. Sometimes I find myself thinking that the characters who populate the Zanardi stories and live his adventure with him look at Zanardi exactly as I look at him and as everyone who reads him does. With a mixture of hatred and liking, because Zanardi is the friend who gave us a hard time when we were little, you know? And he’s the one we’d have liked to crush, but he’s also the person we’d most have liked to resemble.

Andrea Pazienza is accused of not making his stories easy for the public to read, because he starts them and almost never finishes them. Is it only your fault, or the publishers’ too?
It’s absolutely not the publishers’ fault, so it depends solely on me. Here I’ll take the opportunity to say a couple of things: the first, with all due respect for those who read me, is that I don’t worry about them at all… luckily, otherwise I wouldn’t know whose side to take. So I stick to my own side, just as I hope you stick to yours, partly because I don’t mind that much, you know? I don’t lose sleep over their seven thousand lire, their three thousand five hundred lire less; I mean, that’s your damn business after all, isn’t it? What I think is that when I start a story and don’t continue it, I’ve screwed up. But all stories begin and don’t end, and above all I don’t think I use serial-story timing in my comics. It can be annoying, and it certainly will be, because I’m blamed for it, from many sides.… I can’t talk about this without becoming unpleasant; I realize that this calm, resigned tone of mine pains me, and the further I go the sadder I get. The truth – assuming one can speak of truth – is that I really don’t give a damn; from this point of view I’m completely superficial, I don’t give a fuck, so if I don’t feel like it, or if I get a better idea, I drop the previous one and start the new one, always thinking I’ll get back to it the following month, or the month after that, or anyway that I’ll finish it, besides we didn’t see each other much, we’d decide to put it somewhere, and then I never do.

Andrea, you’re one of the co-owners of Frigidaire, the new magazine that has been a huge hit on the Italian market for a year now. It’s a luxury magazine, glossy paper, fair price, very beautiful. Would you tell me about this experience? First Cannibale, then Frigidaire, about this… let’s call it the “Bologna school” born from the ashes of ’77, which has all kinds of productions to its credit.
This is something that can be nice to talk about, at least the first part. I’ve been in Bologna for 8 years, so I was here in ’77 too, I was here even before… Oh well… I don’t feel like talking about Pentothal… seriously, in this case I’ll just talk about the Traum Fabrik. And I’d have liked to give my voice a more emphatic tone, because the Traum was a truly exceptional moment; it was a squatted house here in Bologna, and I got there at the end of April, I met Scozzari, and then I spent all the following months there until mid-’78, when it was cleared out. Out of the Traum came the Gaz Nevada, Scozzari, me, others… and all of us drawing, moving about and producing without anything wanting or needing to be born; we weren’t working for anyone. In fact, we weren’t working, and we were still healthy, and many of my friends were; today they’re less so. And then some time later I met Tamburini, who had made Cannibale which I liked very much, and we started working there too. How did we work? We had incredible jam sessions, and that’s it. The last issues of Cannibale we did in one night, having fun like crazy, irresponsible to the core, drawing whatever we felt like drawing. And of all the experiences that followed, some were good and others bad; I won’t talk about the one with Rizzoli, very important for me as a first phase, but the relationship was rather impersonal, if you can say that. Whereas Il Male for example, was a wonderful experience. Really, I had as much fun as when I went to school, raising hell from morning to night, and I felt less than young, less than intelligent… on those occasions I almost felt like a locomotive, I felt I was with others pedaling like mad, it was just too exceptional… At Cannibale we had these unforgettable jam sessions, but otherwise we didn’t see each other much, we always decided at the last minute. Whereas for Frigidaire the story is very different. I’m a co-owner of this magazine, and here we get into percentages, with a ridiculous percentage compared with Vincenzo Sparagna’s. I’m saying this because I’m answering a question I didn’t write myself. I was asked a question, I’m answering; consequently my share, my purchasing power, is limited to what I manage to produce, since I’m the only one not on salary – maybe someone else isn’t on salary either – who works like this, piecework, let’s say; that’s all. As for my collaborations with others, at least ideal ones, I can say that Filippo [Scozzari] is truly a friend, a great friend; in short, any adjective would be superfluous at this point. The others too. Sometimes we argue, but we really feel like musicians. Now, though, there are those who live in Rome and run the editorial office, and so they have less time for research. These friends almost come to envy, to feel jealous of the provinces like Bologna, where new recruits gather, are born and flourish, and very quickly stop being recruits and promises: people like Igort, Carpinteri, Nicola Corona. Kids who in the space of a month have taken steps others don’t take in a lifetime. And it’s no use saying yes but… oh well… but the story… Here, guys, you can’t split hairs; here there are well-drawn hands, complicated chiaroscuro, triangles, angles that really make sense; for the first time a specialization is being worked out on what was the very confused line of recent years, toward something new. Very beautiful and complicated things, and this can only be done if you have time, and above all if you’re subjected to it. But clearly a kid like Nicola Corona can’t see a page from eight months earlier published, because he’s surfing the wave of what’s happening. And his leftovers can’t pop up when he’s already on another planet… because evolutions, in this case, become color, become mathematics of subject, sensation; it’s another kind of reading… aimed perhaps at an attentive elite. But why can’t attention be asked for? Why must a page that took a day to make be read, and is read, in four, five, at most ten seconds? Attention may be necessary, and Corona’s drawings need precisely that, attention, like Carpinteri’s, like Igort’s, like those of other friends.

Reading your stories, it almost seems that instead of a pencil or a marker you’d like to be able to use an electric guitar for your drawings. What’s your relationship with music?
As far as music is concerned, all music, the most unexpected, I’m a sewer, in that I’m a listener of die-hard radio stations, that is, a die-hard listener of die-hard radio stations. But radio. So I hear everything, because I only listen to the radio; so I appreciate, I draw, I memorize… and sometimes I keep time, and above all I prefer stations that are a real collection of tracks. For the rest, it’s my great regret that I don’t play, because I’d “jam” from morning to night. But evidently I’m not interested to the point of dancing to it that much… music… no, I won’t talk about the music I like.

One last question: you’re very young, twenty-five. What does it feel like to be considered something of an enfant prodige?
I was a very obnoxious enfant prodige, but luckily I was also such a little rascal that I managed to overturn somewhat the sort of automatic dislike people feel for this kind of riffraff, child prodigies. I was a child prodigy at drawing, but if I go back and look at my things I don’t seem that exceptional, and not out of modesty, but because in fact they seem unexceptional things to me, in the truest sense of the word. And so I think I probably also had an artist father around who weaned me, because I practically breathed the air of watercolor; that’s all. I mean, so, by the time I was eighteen I was “jamming” with the pencil, I was doing things I might not be able to do again today. I’m convinced that some things I did at eighteen would be unthinkable today in some ways, but unrepeatable in others. I had a past of pure virtuosity, I was almost a sideshow freak. Then, when I left those lands where I was such a mere protagonist, I came here to Bologna, spent two years playing billiards, becoming a fairly decent loser and… deeply ghettoized among Bologna’s southern crowd… lots of remarkable people… and this doing nothing matured me deeply. I lived with my roommates. We were sick practically 365 days a year and didn’t move from the warm, dirty island of our beds. I got moving because it was inevitable that I would. I started drawing because I had to tell what I saw; otherwise I’d most likely have become a painter.

The recording breaks off abruptly here. Of that day I remember, apart from what I’ve already told you, that at the end of the interview Andrea showed me a folder bulging with pages and sketches, telling me that if I wanted one I could choose it. The temptation, of course, was great, but I refused, thinking I’d be taking away something he made his living from. I thanked him and told him that as soon as we met again, if I had some money, I’d buy a drawing from him. The chance never came again, and I was left, besides the regret, with the certainty of being as decent as I was a fool!