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AMERICA ON MY MIND - 1
America has inevitably exercised a great influence on the industry of
Italian (and world) comics, if only because the first internationally known
representatives of the medium are of American origin. As the homeland of
comics, America was - and still is - idealized by cartoonists as a somewhat
ultimate goal, the only place in the world where the creator of a successful
character may become as "rich and famous" as a film or sport-star.
Italy - like many other European countries - soon developed an autonomous
production of comics (fumetti, or "Little clouds of smoke",
from the shape of the balloons) that outran the imported one (the ratio
is of 80%-20% in favor of the Italian product). Yet, most of the European-made
adventure series continue to be characterized by "American" main
characters and settings (with the exception of French ones, that are a somewhat
logical continuation of the autochtonous "feuilleton", and English
ones, that existed long before than in the United States).
It's an iron rule from which not even Martin Mystère, the
"Detective of the Impossible" of whom I am the creator, can escape.
Though many of his adventures are set in Italy, Mystère "is"
American and "lives" in Washington Mews, NY, a stone's throw from
New York University,
where he has been a lecturer more than once (and this is why he acts as
a testimonial of this lecture).
Apart from the differences in character between the Europeans (more open
toward what is foreign, as they are used to be surrounded by different cultures)
and the Americans (more self-centered, as they live alone on an enormous
continent-island), the reasons for the "American choice" are easy
to understand. Although it can be reached in a few hours' flight, to European
eyes America still represents a far-off country, whilst not being
exotic or "different" like China or India. The things that happen
there (and the social situations, and the people) are similiar enough to
those who happen in Europe, thus making identification possible, with the
advantage that distance makes it difficult to check their exact correspondence.
Thus we can accept situations we won't accept if they were set in our own
country: we can pretend to believe, for instance, that, in America,
a university professor like Martin Mystère can become famous and
maybe rich; were the professor Italian, it would seem rather unrealistic,
as we do know the problems that afflict our school system (probably
the same as in American schools, but we can pretend not to know them).
Europeans never got tired of Western comics as has happened in the U.S.;
Italy, in particular, produces the world's best-selling Western strip, Tex (500,000 copies monthly). Here again,
the explaination is simple: we tend to want (and to mythicize) what we don't
own, and in Europe there is nothing comparable to the Western epics. Reciprocally,
popular American literature swarms with barbarians, knights, dragons and
magicians: a genre, Sword and Sorcery, that has never taken root
on the Old Continent, where the Middle Ages and epic-chivalric literature
have existed (and are considered by many young European readers as boring
"school subjects").
The Italian production of comics presents, however, two features that make
it different in an "American" sense to that of the rest of the
world. Italy is the country that has indipendently continued the largest
number of comic strips created in America, either because the original series
had been cancelled in the United States (like Little Eva, discontinued
in the U.S. in the 50s, and carried on with great success by cartoonist
Terenghi up to the middle 80s), or because the popularity of an American
series in Italy was such to impose the production of new material and stories
longer than the average American ones (Italy produces more than 70% of the
Disney material distrubuted in the world; almost 90% of Popeye comics,
and hundreds of Warner Bros.-MGM funny-animal strips).
The second distinctive feature is more important. The narrative style of
the most successful Italian comic series resumes and developes in modern
terms the narrative style of the American adventure strips of the 30s and
the 40s: wide-ranging stories with strongly marked characters and well-built
intriguing plots. When, in the sixties, the adventure series were dropped
from American newspapers, this style of storytellyng was completely lost
in the U.S.A., and was replaced by the fast, often over-simplified comic-book
scripting. Paradoxically, it is the Italian cartoonists who keep up the
great narrative traditions of the originators of comics.