Wall of Text Incoming
You've Been Warned
Well, I still have a week or so of intensive work ahead of me, but I want to start working on a new project (I ahte to leave the energy controllers unfinished, but I'm kind of burned out at this point).
So, thanks to a couple of conversations with Jab I figured that I'm kind of in a unique position. Pretty much all of us are comic book nuts, but I've started wondering how many of you guys knows about Italian comics. Superheroes aren't really a big thing around here, the few experiment of classic American style hero ended up being pretty ... insignificant (with the partial exception of a few self-published stories). In general Italian comics are firmly rooted in two big genres: comdy/humor and adventure.
A Man Named Bonelli
Giovanni Luigi "Gianluigi" Bonelli (1908-2001) is often considered the patriarch of Italian comics, his contribution to genre is in many way analogous to that of Siegel & Schuster or Stan Lee in the U.S.A.: he pretty much defined the genre singlehandedly. Bonelli started writing short stories and novels in the late '20s and sent the to several magazines for publications under a number of aliases (an habit he broke only after WW2) and in the late '30s he moved to comics. He often joked that he was a "novelist borrowed by comics and never returned".
During the Fascist regime comics were hit pretty hard, authors were forced to write stories only with Italian (or Ancient Roman) protagonists and with antagonists that were strictly British or American, censorship run amok up to the point that all comics but Mickey Mouse were forbidden and considered "a sign of Anglo-Saxon culture" (according to some reports Mickey was spared because it was the favorite character of Mussolini's children). Yet, Bonelli had the chance to read many classics in their original languages, in particular the works of Lee Falk and Alex Raymond, which he often quoted as inspirations next to novelists like Emilio Salgari and Alxandre Dumas.
Around 1940 he bought the rights to the magazine "Audace" (Brave) and opened his own little editorial venture. Despite being forced to flee to Switzerland during the war – while his wife Tea and his son Sergio moved to Genoa – Bonelli kept working creating new characters and writing new episodes for American comics (a common practice back in the day) like Alex Raymond's
Secret Agent X-9.
A Family Venture
After the war Gianluigi and Tea divorced and he gave her the property of his publishing company as a livelihood (by all accounts the separation was extremely serene), while he remained just as a freelance collaborator. Tea – who "had never touched a comic before 1946" according to her son Sergio – turned out to have a real knack as a publisher and in 1948 enlisted Aurelio "Galep" Galeppini to draw two new projects of Gianluigi:
Occhio Cupo (Dark Eye) and
Tex. While Occhio Cupo – a character inspired by both Zorro and the Musketeers – was considered the most promising, it was the dark horse Tex that became the most popular and absolutely defined the genre of the adventure comics.
In 1957 Sergio took over the company and in 1958 introduced a new "notebook style" format that became the staple of Bonelli comics and was copied by almost all their competitors.
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There is a boatload of characters published by Bonelli over the decades, many of the enjoyed just a brief time in the sun – being relegated to mini-series or single special issues – while others were licensed, like Magnus and Doctor Solar from the Gold Key Comics.
There's one really interesting tidbit here: in the '70s Marvel Comics reached to Bonelli to publish the Italian version of Savage Sword of Conan, Sergio Bonelli refused due to his personal lack of interest toward any kind of fantasy narrative. This forced Marvel to contact another publisher, a small and apparently insignificant studio called Comic Art, which – up to that point – had only published a few unacknowledged South American comics. The success of Savage Sword was so big that Comic Art became Bonelli's chief competitor for the decades to come.
Anyway listing all the regular series, anthologies and mini-series published by Bonelli is a titanic task, so I'm going to present to you only the most noticeable ones.
Onward to Adventure
The first generation (spanning roughly from the end of WW2 to the early '60s) presented a number of short lived experiments that allowed Gianluigi Bonelli to test out many ideas based on his love for both Western movies and the swashbuckling genre. All these ideas eventually coalesced in his most successful character:
Tex. Since 1948 Gianluigi infused all he could into writing Tex (he retired officially in 1991) adding many crazy yet fascinating ideas to the initial western setting. While the initial stories followed the classic tropes of the genre, magic, lost worlds inspired by Jules Verne's
Voyage to the Centre of the Earth and other weirdness made their way into the stories, provinding some of the most inspired tales of this 70 years old series. One of the most central elements of all of Bonelli's narrative was how his characters had an anti-racist streak a mile wide and several times as deep. In 1949 - one years prior to Delmer Daves's Broken Arrow (usually considered the first pro-native hollywood movie) - Bonelli wrote a story where Tex married Lilyth, daughter of a Navajo chieftain, the only woman he ever loved.
Make Way for Comedy
At the beginning of the '60s, Sergio Bonelli tried his hand as a writer, under the pseudonym of Guido Nolitta. If Tex could be considered a comic that dwindle between realism (a number of historical figures appears), Sergio's
Zagor was pure literary escapism. The most noticeable difference between the two Bonellis though was the use of comedy. While Gianluigi included a number of humorous situations and very spirited lines of dialogue, Sergio prefered a slapstick comedy, usually centered around Zagor's sidekick Cico (strongly inspired by Laurel & Hardy).
A curious hybrid between Rice-Burroghs's Tarzan and Tex, Zagor's stories took place in the first half of the 18th century around the completely fictional forest of Darkwood in the north-east of the U.S.A. These stories almost always took a turn for the weird and the unexpected, including character inspired by Sergio's love for any form of narrative (exclusing fantasy), from mad scientists a la Frankenstein to aliens, witches and spirits were regularly featured.
This comedic inclusions were nothing new, but it defined most of this decade, in particular thanks to another series:
Commander Mark. Created by an author team under the collective monicker of EsseGesse and based on a previous project for another publisher, Mark was a Canadian soldier during the Franco-Indian War, who had two extremely unlikely sidekicks, a fat ex-pirate and an old pessimistic native.
Antiheroes
During the '70s there were very few experiments, but two of them left a lasting impression: Mister No and Ken Parker. Both these characters were a massive detour from anything published up to that moment, their stories felt much more realistic and the characters lacked the aura of certainty and invincibility of Tex or Zagor.
Jerry Drake - nicknamed
Mister No due to his terrible temper - was a burned out WW2 pilot that moved to Manaus, Brasil in the '50s trying to get away from the haunting memories of the war. Cynical, drunk and often disattisfied, Jerry was nonetheless able of incredible altruism and selfless acts in the same way of the classic hard-boiled protagonists.
Ken Parker was the last western hero published by Bonelli for a while and it's often considered a masterpiece for its extreme realism. Not only the stories were a big step away from the escapism of Zagor or the pure adventure of Tex, but the titular character age consistently and the setting moved along from the first stories set on the frontier to the last in New York, during the strikes of the late 19th century. Ken was generally portrayed like a good man fighting and losing an uphill battle against the greed and the cynism of his contemporaries.
Less Answers, More Questions
As the '80s rolled in, the changes introduced by Mister No and Ken Parker had taken root and the next generation of heroes introduced characters much more flawed, who often questioned the reality, rather than providing certanties.
Martin Mystère - made famous by a rather terrible French TV adaptation - was the first of the bunch. Archeologist, occasional college lecturer and TV host, Martin looked very much like a throwback to the classic square-jawed protagonists of some '50s sci-fi but, in truth, he was anything but. He was first and foremost a thinker, who rarely relied on violence to solve problems. His world was one of alien mysteries, lost civilizations and goverment conspiracies (he numbered the Men in Black among his foes).
A few years later debued the most successful character of this era
Dylan Dog. A London-based former policeman turned P.I., Dylan specialized in solving mysteries linked to monster, ghosts and other supernatural creatures. A luddist by nature, Dylan relies more on intuition (his famed "fifth and a half sense") and had the apparent ability to get glimpses of parallel universes. More often than not his stories included a twist ending revelaing how the monsters were actually innocent compared to the humans.
The odd piece of this generation was
Nick Raider, a character born from the undying love of his creator, Claudio Nizzi, for procedural police novels (in particular Ed McBain's). A detective of New York's Murder and serious crime unit, Nick's stories were 100% realistic and Nizzi went out of the way to get police procedure as accurate as humanly possible.
While published in 1991,
Nathan Never was still part of this generation. A special agent from a private security firm in a cyberpunk city that took inspiration from number sources including Judge Dredd, WIlliam Gibson's novel and Jack Kirby's sci-fi comics, Nathan was a nostalgic in a world dominated by a pervasive technology. This series had the merit of creating a vast supporting cast that worked without the main character and spawned a secondary series a few years later.
Another bit of trivia, halfway through the '90s the Dark Horse Comics published the first 12 issues of Martin Mystère (renamed Martin Mystery), Dylan Dog and Nathan Never. Unfortunately they were heavily censored (Dylan above all) and the issue weren't in chronological order.
Make Way for the Ladies
The '90s brought in a number of changes with many new formats (Zona X, an anthology based around Martin Mystère and Agenzia Alfa [Alpha Agency] featuring the supporting cast of Nathan Never) and - finally I might had - ongoing series featuring female leads.
Legs Weaver had been the long time platonic fighting partner of Nathan Never. A hard-as-nails gun-toothing ex-convict, Legs wasn't just the first female protagonists of a Bonelli comic, but also the first openly omosexual lead in an Italian comic. Compared to Nathan highly introspective stories, Legs was like a fireworks show. Her stories were less personal and much more action-oriented.
Julia Kendal sat at almost the opposite end of the spectrum to Legs. A police profiler and college professor, her stories were extremely slow-paced and had a lot in common with Nick Raider's being as realistic as humanly possible.
Gea - the brainchild of my friend Luca Enoch - was the first timid attempt to bypass Sergio Bonelli's famous intollerance to fantasy tales. Gea is a teenager who inherited the mission to be a Sentinel, a sort of "angelic" soldier that protect Eearth form extradimensional incursions. Despite being, quite possibly the most powerful and superheroic character of this line-up, she was also incredibly unstable and lacked any kind of fine control over the powers.
There were two more rather interesting experiment, albeit much more classics:
Bredon -- a strange post-apocalypse/fairy tale mix, where the titular character roamed across what was left of Great Britain after a nuclear winter -- and
Magico Vento (
Magic Wind, actually published in the US by Epicenter Comics) -- a western/horror story featuring a former U.S. soldier affected by amnesia and adopted by a Sioux medicine-man.
Testing and Testing
With the turn of the millenium the editorial policy changed radically and a metric crapton of characters debued in their own miniseries to test the market. From the half-blooded vampire hunter
Harlan Draka masked vigilante to the science-fantasy tiem-travlling epic of Lilith to the maked vigilante
Morgan Lost, these new character broadned once again the mold created by Bonelli senior back in 1948. Unfortunately at this point in history I had pretty much stopped reading Bonelli comics so many characters are pretty much unknown to me, with one glaring exception.
Ian Aranil is the main character of Dragonero (black dragon) the first 100% fantasy series that debued just a couple of years before Sergio Bonelli's death in 2015. right now his son Davide took over the family business.