Aficionados
Author: Andrea Pazienza
Title: Aficionados
Pages: 64, Color
Price: 16,00 euro
Date: September 2019
A long lost war masterpiece from the most important Italian cartoonist of all times.
Year 1942: the clumsy and picaresque mission of Lieutenant Stella and his men in the North African desert. Between English battalions, Berber villages and copious amounts of the wondrous Italian art of getting by, this is the adventure of a handful of anti-heroes that turns into a whirlwind of tragicomic situations and plot twists.
The most picaresque of Andrea Pazienza’s works is back in a new color edition.
“On June 6, 1942, a cavalry battalion forming part of the “Littorio” division of the Italian Army was set up in Touggourt, Algeria with the order is to inspect a certain number of oases, check the status of some wells, confirm the existence of certain tracks… “. Suddenly, however, comes the order to rejoin the other divisions marching towards El Alamein. And so, while the rest of the troop moves away towards the ominous destiny, Lieutenant Stella, corporal D’Angelo and two simple soldiers are left with their tank to
complete the reconnaissance tour.
In a tourbillon of comical finds and with a crackling series of twists and turns, the exploits of this handful of heroes flow, struggling with the best virtues of the Italian genius, ending up getting lost in the African desert, leaving behind the war and all the problems, looking for a new promised land.
Originally colored in film, Aficionados was first published in July 1981 as a special summer bulletin for Frigidaire magazine. This new edition is embellished by the colors of LRNZ, one of the most important cartoonists and graphic designers on the contemporary scene, who recounts in the afterword the technique and approach with which he faced the challenge of this “collaboration” with Paz. The volume also contains a short essay by Oscar Glioti, which tells how Aficionados was born, and the presentation of the original book written in 1981 by Filippo Scòzzari.
« I often say to myself that if he hadn’t done what he did, in both storytelling and illustration, I’d have never made a single line. »
Gipi
« He was the James Joyce of comics. He managed to represent the fate, pipe dreams, madness, genius, misery, and desperation of a generation that only for the sake of expediency, perfunctorily, do we call the Bolognese generation of ’77. Of that movement Andrea Pazienza was perhaps the greatest bard, poet, artist. »
Pier Vittorio Tondelli
ANDREA PAZIENZA A true visionary, with a fluid line and an uncanny sense of color and composition, Andrea Pazienza’s innovative graphic style served up stories that were iconoclastic, outrageous, humorous, and deeply personal, often based on himself and his microcosm of friends and collaborators. Pazienza was a revolutionary cartoonist who ushered an underground sensibility to Italian and European comics, breaking from the more staid tradition of genteel adult (and children’s) graphic albums Black & White illustrations with some color. Born in 1956 in San Benedetto del Tronto and died of a heroin overdose in 1988 when he was only 32, he is a cultural hero of Italian counterculture. His stories and his characters are impressed in the imagination of young people to this very day while numerous streets, boardwalks and squares, are named after him.