Which cartoonists influenced you most?
Jacovitti, Moebius of course, Carl Barks’s Donald Duck…
Tell us about your characters. The first and the last, for example. Pentothal and Zanardi.
Pentothal was the first, and his very first story was the only one that really got me hooked. After that I don’t think I did anything truly autobiographical, otherwise I’d have become a caricature of myself. So it’s not true that Pentothal and I are the same person, but I’m very fond of him. It was very easy to build those stories, in a shamelessly dreamlike dimension full of very easy quotations. But by now he’s a character dated by years, he no longer makes sense. Zanardi, on the other hand, came from a need I felt some time ago to denounce the repeated bullying I suffered as a teenager from boys a bit older than me, a bit stronger, certainly more cunning, definitely more aggressive, I don’t know how much more intelligent. Anyway, nastiness also requires a certain intelligence and creativity. Deep down we’ve all known characters like these; I think each of us has our tormentor buried in childhood memories and then perhaps repressed. I fished him out, I assembled distinctive physical features taken from people I know who have a bit of Zanardi’s character (I took one’s mouth, another’s eyes, another’s hair…) and I created a character who exists, whom we’ve all known, not only in his psychology but also in his physical build. Zanardi isn’t an autobiographical phantom either, like Pentothal. He’s reflective, whereas I’ve always been a bit hysterical, even in my moments of aggressive, quarrelsome madness. Maybe I’d have liked to be like him, to balance the fortunes of a war I felt I was losing at the time; but then, as time went on, circumstances changed decidedly in my favor.
What’s your working method, and what do you use to draw?
I use markers, and that lets me change drawing style often. Each marker has its own precise identity and has to be used for a particular purpose. In the days of Pentothal I made single pages without thinking of a precise plot, and then when I had a few on the table I studied them to see if they could be stitched together into a story that made sense. But not even “sense” interested me much. In fact, there are many stories that have no logical sequence. And that’s understandable: sometimes I’d thought of the page that would become number six before number one, for example, and without having imagined number five or number two. The idea of the story was often just a pretext to start working on a plot.
Are you fast at drawing, or do your pages take you days and days of work?
Now I’m much faster than I used to be. I often work at night, and in that night I do a complete page. If there’s a lot of work to do, it can take a night and a half.
How do you assess the two publishing experiences you’re most involved in, or have been: Cannibale and Frigidaire?
Filippo Scozzari and I joined Cannibale when it was already being published in an experimental version by Massimo Mattioli and Stefano Tamburini. Liberatore came even after us. Its distribution was haphazard, and so was its frequency. But sales went fairly well, since out of a print run of 40,000 copies about 17,000 were sold. Frigidaire was born as an attempt to get out of this narrow core of readers by offering a luxury magazine that was supposed to be a big commercial operation. Instead it failed and, from my point of view, became a big cultural operation. My colleagues are extraordinary, the magazine is splendidly laid out… I’m not even out to do stupid advertising, but what I really think is that this magazine has a secure future. I don’t know how many copies it prints, but it sells about thirty thousand, which isn’t much, but allows us to survive. From a certain point of view I have a very unusual relationship with the magazine. I’ve always considered myself an outsider to the management politburo, even though I’m very interested in contributing. But it may also be that in a while the others and I will have tired of Frigidaire and will move on to do something else, regardless of whether Frigidaire has caught on. It’s in our logic to do so. From the outside we look like a group, even though we don’t tend to give that image. From the inside, though, relationships are very “modern”. Our collaborations with one another are as little professional and as passionate as it is possible to put together in comics today. Our internal squabbles are splendid, and much envied by all those magazines that settle for approval and go on by inertia without much bickering.
What does the experience of Frigidaire mean for your group? Having carved out a tailor-made kind of reader? One whose existence wasn’t known before?
Frigidaire was not a point of arrival for us, only a starting point. Even so, it’s a very rich experience, a magazine that’s very entertaining as well as informative. Naturally this jumble of things creates some handicaps, and there are readers who appreciate only the parts most congenial to them and skip the others: some love only the comics and want nothing to do with the features, or vice versa. Anyway, the magazine has its own path, which has prevailed over everything. It has a well-defined graphic approach, reading urgency and layout; the biggest risk would be to settle down, going straight along its path without evolving as much as necessary. Anyway, right now it’s irreplaceable and, I repeat, only we could surpass it, if we decided to do something else.
