Joe Galaxy
Author: Massimo Mattioli
Title: Joe Galaxy
Pages: 192, Color
Price: 25,00 euro
Date: October 2019
Foreign sales: France (Revival); Russia (ComFed); World English (Fantagraphics Books).
Joe Galaxy’s comics? Think of a spacecraft that runs through the eye of the Moon of Méliès, that is, the birth of the cinema as we know it today, imagine a Buck Rogers under LSD that slumbers, threatens, kills and fucks, add the monologues of the hard-boiled cops and parodies of Philip K. Dick, a pop aesthetic ranging from Merrie Melodies to Lichtenstein, to Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton and Moebius.
Joe Galaxy was born in the late 1970s in the satirical magazine Il Male, as a space adventurer who is constantly looking for shady jobs to make lots of money. Half eagle and half duck, but a hundred percent human, he wears a jumper as blue as the planet Earth,
gloves as white as the Milky Way and a photonic Colt at his waist, just in case. Joe Galaxy’s adventures are the manifestation of a wacky universe where everything is legitimized and acceptable (kind of like today’s world, ehm?), a vortex of action and nonsense, black humor and free violence, delusional sex and bursts of nitric nitrogen gags.
Out of print for decades, this integral edition collects all the episodes of Joe Galaxy, starting in 1979 plus the bonus of an unreleased final story, “Planet Doris”, made in 2018.
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« Multiply by thousands and elevate
to the square. You won't even get
close. »
Gipi
« Massimo Mattioli is not just a comics genius escaping the world in the vein of Salinger: he is, as Andrea Pazienza would say, 'practically a rockstar. »
La Repubblica
« Mattioli: an irreplaceable and
sulfurous talent. »
Il Corriere della Sera
« The art of changing artistic register belongs only to the greatest. If an artist succeeds easily in both splatter provocation and children's story - while staying true, deep, to his own stylistic identity - it means he is destined to stay. And Massimo Mattioli will remain safe. »
Il Sole 24 Ore
MASSIMO MATTIOLI was born in Rome on September 25th 1943. His surreal, humorous comic strips debuted for the first time in 1965 for the magazine in Il Vittorioso. He then spent some time in both France and the UK, drawing the adventures of M le magicien for the magazine Pif and collaborating with Mayfair magazine. Back in Italy, he worked with Il Corriere dei Ragazzi, Lupo Alberto and Paese Sera. In 1973 he created the Pinky series on the pages of Il Giornalino, which would go on for over 40 years. The protagonist was a pink bunny working as a photo-reporter that, with apparent candor, made fun of all the clichés of children’s narratives. Along with his children’s work Mattioli continued to put out significant work targeted at adults. In 1977, together with Stefano Tamburini, Andrea Pazienza, Gaetano Liberatore and Filippo Scozzari, he creates the groundbreaking magazine Cannibale, where he published both self-concluding stories and the adventures of humorous mean characters such as Joe Galaxy. From 1980 to 1987 he was both one of the co-creators and regular contributor of the magazine Frigidaire, where he published, among others, the horrorsplatter adventures of Squeak the Mouse. During his career, he has been awarded several prizes, among which the Phoenix in 1971, the Yellow Kid in 1975 and the Romics d’Oro in 2009.