Forgive us, but it’s not our fault. With our trusty tape recorder and notes in our notebook the conversation began, but there was very little room for our questions. So, Andrea Pazienza unleashed. He tells us about himself, his “career”, his past, what he’s doing and what he wants now, his future plans, anticipating and exhausting our curiosity. For those who don’t know him (!?) Andrea is one of the best comic artists in Italy and in Europe. A dazzling debut in Alter in ’77, where Penthotalwas born: huge graphic impact, chronicles inside/outside the “movement”, flashes of everyday life. At the same time he created (with Scozzari, Tamburini, Liberatore) Cannibale, a semi-luxurious underground fanzine, a testing ground for the future and more elegant Frigidaire, where he would move his multicolored pages. It is here that Zanardi was born, who belongs to the author’s second period. Like Penthotal, the character mirrors the social and cultural reality of the period, the so-called “riflusso” (retreat into private life): little sociability, unbridled individualism, nastiness, a tendency to hooliganism. He is again a litmus test of a youth condition that changed profoundly in those years. He currently contributes to Corto Maltese and to Alter where in ’85 he created the character of Pompeo, whom Andrea talks about in the following pages, claiming the continuity of his discourse and its hidden qualities. All that remains for us is to thank him for his willingness, his sincerity, and to love him as readers and… friends (as well as fellow nostalgics of ’77).

Stefania Scateni and Marco Petrella

“I ‘m finishing these days Pompeo. It’s a story that has left most readers, even occasional ones, rather indifferent if not critical or skeptical about the situation. You almost feel like saying: come on, cut it out, die, do something, just get out of our hair. Seen from the author’s side, though, the matter is clearly different. I’ve very rarely found myself defending my work; I’ve never cared much. In the last installment of Pompeo there’s a final postscript where I say: I’ve never cared about money while drawing, if anything immediately before or after, but never during. I mean that in the end, when I sit down to draw, I do what I like. I’ve always done that, for better or for worse, and that’s also where my character, my characters, come from. Specifically, I defend Pompeo against what I don’t know, maybe a bit against myself, against the time I spent on it. It started out as a working hypothesis. A first installment existed in ’83; I took it in a folder to Switzerland, to Ascona, and showed it to Vincenzo Mollica and Mauro Paganelli, and they urged me to continue to see where it would lead. After the first 4 or 5 pages, the story was taking a rather adventurous turn, there was talk of arms trafficking, money, terrorism… Continuing from these premises, I instead kept only the first pages and continued the introspective discourse on the character, on what was happening to him. The story begins with him deciding to kill himself and, as is customary, jumps back in time, as so often happens in novels, to then bring the whole story back to the moment of the beginning and from there verify the ending. And in the end Pompeo kills himself for a whole series of reasons. But in my opinion the meaning of the whole operation, which is also a literary operation, will be understood when the book is published. It’s almost 130 pages, and reading one installment, or even reading them in a row, without having the overall picture of the whole operation is rather limiting. Pompeo is a very windy character, and what emerges in the end is that he sums up in himself the anguished traits of the whole series of my characters, from those of my first stories, like Giorno which presented itself precisely as a distillate of anguish, to the other characters. He sums them all up, a bit. He has many reasons to suffer, beyond being a drug addict. He is one because certain things happen to him. As if to say: you don’t want me because I have flat feet, but you don’t want me also because I shoot up. So I shoot up, so that at least you don’t want me for a reason other than flat feet.
What should emerge (and in my opinion it may happen when there’s an overview of the whole work) is that this character refuses to suffer until the very end, and so refuses to think. He reaches death almost as a baseball player reaches home plate, exploiting prehistoric speeds by inertia. He gets there and doesn’t suffer; he reaches death without suffering because he doesn’t stop to think about the reasons leading him to suicide. When at a certain point these become so pressing and present as to cause him great suffering, or at least to force decisions about his future and what’s happening to him, he decides to commit suicide. And yet he doesn’t die. He doesn’t die in the way he chose, that is an overdose, without pain, and when he wakes up he finds himself facing all the problems he thought he had escaped. He persists in his decision to kill himself; naturally at this point the problems resurface, the terrible thoughts come out. That of his mother is the dominant thought, and also the symbol of the thoughts that may contribute to his great existential sorrow. Pompeo is deeply grieved by what life is, by what he calls a profound lack of motivation about what to do. He’s clearly an autobiographical character. I began this story at a time of serious disappointment and very great crisis, when I left Bologna and withdrew to the countryside to lead an almost “monastic” life. I continued it by stepping back into the character in an almost schizophrenic way every time I had to draw him, keeping the rhythm the story showed from the very first pages. In any case it’s a story few have read and very few have understood. I trust that, once the book is published, people, myself first, will be able to get a fairly accurate picture of the situation. Certainly it’s a fairly in-depth investigation of a phenomenon, of a problem. I don’t know whether this investigation in these terms has already been done by others; I don’t think so. In any case, beyond this, which should be the novelty factor (but which I’m not here to promote), Pompeo is a “guts on the table” discourse, which is the only thing that interests me.
This kind of reasoning led me back to Mayakovsky, to Pasternak, to Yesenin. Suffering is a splendid planet to explore and a source of countless possible wanderings in the field of inquiry. In a sort of eclectic fury, I’ve worked with comedy, with adventure, with everyday life, with satire and also with suffering, with anguish. This Pompeo is the sum of a whole series of life experiences; it’s certainly autobiographical, made of work, of storytelling, of literary experiences. From the economic point of view, when I decide to do Pompeo, I give up a boatload of money, because if I did a story in color they could publish it everywhere. It’s evident that Pompeo is what it is and that, seen this way, the discourse blazes with a certain reckless honesty. From the technical point of view: the materials used are all scrap paper. I refused to use the usual F4 sheets and worked instead on salvaged sketchbooks; grid paper, lots of patches (adhesive paper on which I work to make corrections).
I don’t usually correct mistakes; it’s not that I get a hand wrong and put a patch on it. I intervene to correct the sense of a line. The discussion about materials, and about the fact that these pages look sloppy, is one that in my opinion is neither here nor there. You don’t get very far with that discussion, because from my point of view I’m against any form.
At first I worked on Pompeo with huge feelings of guilt, because I concentrated the work into a few nights. I worked a few hours a night, a week, and during the day I was weighed down by these feelings of guilt for being sloppy and not devoting enough time to it. Now instead I’ve realized that the only way to do Pompeo is precisely this, that is, to spend a great deal of time thinking, digesting. You can imagine, even for the ending of Pompeo, in its simplicity, how many possibilities had opened up for me (the ways of dying, for example, each more fascinating than the last), whether to let him die or not, or what position to take regarding all the people and all the behaviors exposed in the story itself. And this is one way of drawing. The time spent on Pompeo is certainly not the time I take to do a page of Zanardi, Notte di carnevale for example; on the contrary, I thought about it much more. Anyway, I don’t feel obliged to answer about this. At a certain point in my life I told myself: I wasn’t born to draw Michael Jackson’s little gloves, I’m not interested in drawing little watches for Philip Watch, I’m not interested in getting into fashion. What interests me is communicating, communicating in a certain way. I’m used to everything, I’m rather sui generis, because I had a great deal of gratification when I was young, so being seen everywhere, always attending events or promoting them at all costs, didn’t interest me before, and today it interests me less than ever. I’m constantly searching for valid reasons to communicate something, to keep telling fairy tales.
But at this point the public seems to me to have become a child who never grows up, who doesn’t want to go to sleep, and every evening Dad has to tell him a bedtime story to keep him happy. After telling bedtime stories for a while I get fed up, so I always have to look for different, new things. Whether these then reach 5,000/500,000 or 5 people leaves me completely indifferent, since I’m paid more than the others, and I earned that without meaning to. But I don’t feel I have an armchair I’ve sat down in and have to keep at all costs through quality. What deeply disgusts me, instead, is having to scheme to keep myself in this armchair. Whether they pull it out from under me, whether they already have, whether they will, leaves me completely indifferent.
Zanardi , on the other hand, is a discourse linked to post-’77. I’m convinced that ’77 was a peak year in which fashion stopped, many things stopped. Unlike ’68, which was too steeped in politics to have overly evident repercussions on behavior, sociology and lifestyle. ’77 was above all a way of making revolution within one’s own groups. In fact, it lasted as long as it lasted, very little. Just as I’m convinced there’s no comparison between Sid Vicious and Michael Jackson. I’m certainly nostalgic for ’77, and as far as I’m concerned the story ended there. Clearly, though, it went on, but it went on in a very mannerist way, according to very glamorous dictates. As far as I’m concerned, if I had something to say I said it, and if I have something to say I’ll say it, but keep me out of these stories. Partly because unfortunately at first I fell into the trap, showing up everywhere and acting a bit as an icebreaker for a whole series of characters who came after.
In my opinion a comic, like a book or a film, has to move the kiai. The kiai, according to the discipline of kendo, corresponds to the solar plexus. If I have to beat someone, I don’t beat him with my head, I don’t hit him with my paws, I hit him with my solar plexus. If I say you have to move because I’m going to flatten you, pin you against the wall, I say it with my stomach. That’s when you’re truly frightening, and I’m interested in frightening, everything else doesn’t exist. And that’s where the discussion of technique comes from.
In ’80 I went to the United States to look for the ’80s sign, because I thought it couldn’t be traced back to the logic of the triangle: away with circles, away with triangles, it seemed a rather puerile system to me. I came back without having found anything that interested me, nothing that was a way to reach pleasure. Like when you masturbate: if you want to come you have to think about something you like a lot, which through a sort of alchemical mechanism brings you to ejaculation. That’s how it is, unless you want an eternal, eternal, eternal, eternal wank over pleasant, beautiful things, but without ever overflowing. Whereas I want to overflow. I’m for this kind of thing, and the discussion of technique, with these premises, falls away, partly because you’d have to get into what comics are, what art is, whether there are differences. Who cares what is and what isn’t; the important thing is whether, reading a story, you come away moved, affected or not. The point is that there are stories that affect you immediately; the moment you read them you feel carried away in a sort of train car you step into and then the train goes. Or, conversely, you buy the ticket and then they announce the train is six hours late, and you stay at the station like an idiot and never leave.
An important problem, on the other hand, is the vehicle: the magazines, the ones that exist, the opportunities on offer. Two years ago there was an incredibly huge number of magazines to publish in. Today very few are left; many closed within a year. So if before there was a certain power over the publisher and you could choose where to publish, today that’s gone, and publishers are regaining their swagger. Luckily I haven’t yet had to deal with this attitude, but I can easily imagine it. We’re back to before ’77. It’s a terrible thing, and a discussion to be explored for comics, because the vehicle is fundamental. You can make very beautiful things, but if they don’t publish them they stay there. If they censor you and you can’t say “I’m leaving”, that’s very serious.
Now I’m thinking of doing a story, the most important story I’ve ever done. It should be called Fino all’estremo (To the Extreme) and will consist of 150 pages, 10 stories linked by a common thread, which is the terrible suffering of a person. A man who suffers greatly for a combination of reasons, including love, very present in my stories, and what could be called a general impoverishment of motivations. This should be a terrible story, but comic, in which Zanardi appears in a crime-story capacity. He appears at the end as the only possible point of reference.
Let me give an example that’s also a preview. If you have to kill a person you can do it yourself, but if you have to saw off his hand with a Black & Decker to ruin his life, then things get complicated, because you have to have the guts, and also because the guy is still there, alive. This person suffers and at a certain point decides to act, and when he has to act he looks in the underworld for a suitable individual but can’t find one. If you had to look for someone willing to saw off someone else’s hand or beat up a pregnant woman, you’d hardly find one, even if you paid. Zanardi has his role in this; he can pop up as the only option.
Fino all’estremo are color pages drawn with a new system. For the first time I’ll work with another person, very talented, who will do the backgrounds. They’ll be similar to the backgrounds Walt Disney uses for The Jungle Book or Cinderella. The figures, on the other hand, will be separate from the rest and will move on acetate sheets, like an animated cartoon. The effect is very Disney-like. Actually my reference isn’t Disney but Tex Avery, much more sensual. He draws fantastic dolls and wolves preying on them; his cartoons were so sexy that during the McCarthy era they were destroyed.
The stories of Fino all’estremo are structured in episodes linked to one another, and the result should be very homogeneous, especially in the writing, because I won’t jump from one style to another anymore but will always keep the same kind of line; I’ll also always use the same colors. In my opinion there are two basic kinds of stories. There’s the “rainbow” story, the one you have entirely in front of you when you walk down the street; it’s perfect and needs nothing but to be put on paper. The ways and the timing are completely irrelevant because the story, the essence, is there. This is the case, for example, with Giallo scolastico, Giorno, Notte di carnevale. Conversely, there’s another way of working, at the desk, with no ideas in your head. In this case I divide the pages into modules and move within them mathematically, according to a consequential logic, bearing in mind a whole series of factors, including cinematic ones, from one image to the next, to reach a result. More forced, but also more novel.
Then there’s, for example, Penthotal which is another discourse linked to the work I did before, that is, paintings. Before making comics I painted, paintings of social protest. Those were times when I couldn’t help doing that. But my paintings were bought by pharmacists who hung them in their bedrooms. The fact that the painting kept pulsing in that setting seemed to me not only a contradiction but also an enormous limitation. Hence my desire to make comics. My first comics, then, Penthotal for example, act as a link between the work of an artist and that of a comic artist. At first I distinguished two distinct personalities, and one or the other took over depending on the period and the circumstances. One is an image, so to speak: rotten teeth, dirty hair, a nose full of blackheads, impressive thinness, the haggard type, the sacristan, no success with women, the bell-ringer. The other, the Penthotal image, is totemic, wooden, hard, indifferent, defensive in its dealings with the outside world, provincial and maladjusted but more self-assured within certain limits. To it belong the stories that came out in Linus, L’appuntamento, or the one where the character tidies his room and puts all the books and newspapers in exactly the right place.
They’re two opposing images, but also complementary. I mean that anyway you can have a single character and make him live in a thousand different ways, or a thousand characters and make them live in a single way, or have a thousand and make them live in a thousand different ways, which would like to be my case.
Today I’ve understood that I’m not interested in showing up everywhere (where I basically get nothing in my pocket, let alone in my heart); I don’t feel like working occasionally in advertising or as a graphic designer dealing with shitty people; things I thought should somehow contribute to the overall success of my work. Now that I stay home sleeping until 11 in the morning, having dogs, eating, living a life between army boots and slippers, enjoying nature, I’m much better.
I want to take it easy for a while longer. I’d like to avoid working as much as possible so I can do what I like as much as possible. It’s also right to take your activity as a real job, to commit, toil, sweat, take a cue from this or that reading to put together a satisfying story idea that’s enjoyable both to make and to read. But personally, the mere idea of all this contrivance tires me out. I don’t want to think: I like this story, it can work. The concept doesn’t even cross my mind. I’d rather be free, be called unreliable. In fact, I want to stress my absolute unreliability.”