Another Glamour book devoted to Andrea Pazienza. Are there reasons for it?
There are plenty, believe me. The first, the most obvious, is that he produces at a dizzying pace. Which alone would justify adding another volume to the previous one, given that the Glamour books are meant above all to serve as catalogs, as complete and up to date as possible, of each of the authors collected in monographic anthologies. But it isn’t only the quantity of his output that characterizes Andrea Pazienza. The point is rather that he seems to be the material embodiment of the dialectic of opposites.

Violent/gentle, scathing/naive, figurative/stylized, photographic/grotesque, poetic/pornographic, refined/vulgar, tender/cruel, depressing/exhilarating, standoffish/attractive…

Do you have others, of these synonyms/antonyms, these convergences/divergences or analogies/contradictions, to apply to Andrea Pazienza? Feel free! They all fit! Because he is the most pyrotechnic, sparkling, volcanic, explosive comic artist in Italy today, both in the volume and in the quality of his work. And yet, without giving up this absolutely dualistic perspective on Andrea Pazienza’s output, there is a strange uniformity in everything he does, in this incredibly varied, seething magma that comes out of his hands, his markers, in short, his working tools, whatever they may be.
And it is that softness which, in spite of everything, can be felt even behind his crudest things, because substance is one thing and form another. Does he use a marker? Well, you can feel that those bizarre yet so «true» figures were sketched in an instant: but not superficially, rather with an inventive felicity beyond compare. Or does he produce temperas? You can’t help being surprised – and why not admiring? – at that softness of tones and shades that characterizes so many of his figures. Does he work with a Rapidograph? It’s inevitable to marvel at the accuracy, the precision, the sense of minute detail that ooze from his «little figures»: which, put like that, sounds like a poetic sugar cube, whereas his «little figures» often contain a realism so cruel it gives you goosebumps… But anyway, and precisely because of that minute execution, where on earth is the kinship with those grotesque caricatures dashed off any old how (for example, for the cartoons in Tango)? None! They seem to be authors light-years apart. And yet it’s always the same hand, always the same highly skilled «lion’s paw». Of a pyrotechnic creativity that one need not hesitate to call truly unique. Nor can there be any doubt that his creativity is authentic and complete. Because besides being explosively creative graphically, Andrea Pazienza is also inexhaustibly inventive linguistically. Let’s set aside, perhaps, the simple matter (which isn’t simple at all) of content, that is, of the subjects tackled by his stories, because this isn’t the right place to explore it. But it’s so much of his linguistic «form» that leaves you astounded: that continuous, sparkling invention of new words and unusual verb forms — often phonetic transcriptions of spoken language, in who knows how many Italian dialects — those crackling audacities that nonetheless bear the mark of a spark of genius, and that lead, with disconcerting dichotomy, to think, if you will, both of the literary giant Carlo Emilio Gadda and of the comics volcano Benito Jacovitti (yet another of Andrea Pazienza’s contradictions? Who knows…)
All these are elements of a multifaceted personality, each of which would require an investigation of its own. But they would be so many separate investigations that would then inevitably have to converge in a single portrait, almost an image formed, as in a mosaic, by many separate glittering tiles. These are the reasons for another Glamour book about him: to give at least the table of contents of this flowing novel «in progress» that is Andrea Pazienza’s output.