WHEN COMICS WERE PISSED OFF
AND BLACK…
by Luca Boschi from Passioni Violente no. 3 (August 1987)
Andrea Pazienza is still one of the cartoonists most loved by young readers, those who, a good ten years ago now, were crazy about the stories published by the monthly Alter Alter, when it first brought to Italy the fantastic tales of Moebius and the big gang from the French magazine Metal Hurlant, or when it launched the neo-academy of Valvoline, a series of cartoonists attentive to the movements of fashion and design even more than to those of the small-big medium they had chosen, comics. When the enthusiasm for all these authors had long since died down and even the magazines willing to host them were slowly disappearing, Andrea Pazienza remained; he moved on his surfboard across the surface of the most diverse publications without ever getting too involved, and he kept (and keeps) going strong with his stories of violence and heroin, of desperation or mocking satire. Sex, in Andrea’s stories, is an element that is more or less always present, sometimes lived with irony but, more often, with a good dose of suffering and humiliation. Fertile ground for applying the old adage “homo homini lupus”.
The latest adventures of his best-known character, Zanardi, bear witness to this: a cocktail of everything frightening that can be found in a human being, whose negative character traits correspond, physically, to an assemblage of features that we are traditionally inclined to attribute to a sour, cruel, uncaring, irritating person, devoid of any crumb of altruism not directed at himself. what would it mean?
– says Andrea Pazienza – was born of the need to denounce the repeated assaults I suffered as a teenager from boys a little older than me, a little stronger, certainly more cunning, certainly more aggressive, I don’t know how much more intelligent. Anyway, nastiness also needs a certain intelligence and creativity. I believe each of us, deep down, has our own tormentor buried in our childhood memories and then perhaps repressed. I fished mine out and created a character who exists, whom we have all known not only in his psychology but also in his physical build”.
Recently, Pazienza has pushed the eroticism pedal a little harder than usual, producing for the small publisher Glamour the little book Pazeroticus in which he lets us in, once again with a good dose of irony, on his personal way of understanding eroticism. These are not morbidly erotic illustrations, but drawings whose main feature is serenity.
“ I dashed them off very quickly in San Menaio, my hometown, in two days, and while doing them I was thinking of all those situations that would have turned me on as a kid”.