Fans and colleagues pay respects to late Italian comics author <PERSON> · Global Voices
<PERSON> riding a motorbike. Photo: a frame of the documentary “Magnus – Il segno del viandante” by TSW films, directed by <PERSON>. Used with permission.
Italian comics author <PERSON> died at 75 on March 20, 2020, in Bologna, the city of his birth, of a brain aneurysm. A public funeral will be scheduled after the end of the COVID-19 quarantine in Italy.
Colleagues, who affectionately called him “grandmaster,” or simply <PERSON>, admired <PERSON> for the wide scope of his talent as a comics artist, which included pen drawing, inking, painting, and script-writing.
Tribute to <PERSON> and <PERSON>, depicting them as characters from The Company of the Gallows: minstrel and slinger <PERSON> and knight Sir <PERSON>. Cartoon by illustrator <PERSON>, used with permission.
In his homeland, <PERSON> was acclaimed as a life-long collaborator of the late comics legend <PERSON>, the pen name of <PERSON> (1939-1996). The Italian newspaper La Stampa called <PERSON> “<PERSON>'s squire” in an obituary.
Their collaboration began in the sixties with the series “Kriminal” and the book “Satanik,” both classics of the fumetti neri (“black comics”) genre—black-and-white crime thrillers with elements of horror and sex.
Their joint work continued with “Alan Ford,” a grotesque parody of the spy genre created by writer <PERSON> and <PERSON>, which <PERSON> helped illustrate. 192
The acclaimed series celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2019, having achieved cult status across the former Yugoslavia (it's still printed in both Italy and Serbia).
After <PERSON>'s death, some media outlets in the Balkans published obituaries describing him as “the illustrator of ‘Alan <PERSON>’,” implying he was doing it on his own. He was actually one of several illustrators of the series, and in fact was only credited as such on the issues 114, 121, 124.
In the late 1970s, <PERSON> teamed up with <PERSON> again to produce “The Company of the Gallows,” a blend of epic fantasy and humor in a format similar to <PERSON>.
Comprised of 20 issues of 120 pages each, the story revolves around a ragtag group of Renaissance mercenaries and their misadventures in Europe, Middle East and Southeast Asia, inspired by the impressions from the authors’ actual travels to those places.
“The Company of the Gallows” (or “La Compagnia della Forca” in its original title) is regarded as <PERSON> and <PERSON>’ masterpiece.
In the 1980s, <PERSON> illustrated “Donald Duck” for Topolino, an Italian magazine that published Disney comics. In parallel at that time, <PERSON> worked with <PERSON> on a comics about <PERSON>, a Hungarian-born porn star who became a member of parliament in Italy in 1987.
“Company of the Gallows” (“Družina od vješala”) in Croatian language, published in Yugoslavia in 1986. Photo by <PERSON>, CC BY.
Many Yugoslav fans of <PERSON>'s work only heard about him in 1986, when a Croatian translation of “The Company of the Gallows” came out. That was because Yugoslav publishers of licensed comics omitted the name of some collaborators, listing only the “stars,” such as <PERSON> and <PERSON>. That was the case with the Disney comics, which were extremely popular in Yugoslavia at that time — they also came signed as “<PERSON>,” even though <PERSON> himself had died decades before.
During the seven years before his death by cancer in 1996, <PERSON> worked with <PERSON> on a special project featuring <PERSON>, the main character of the influential Italian Western comics series “Tex.”
In the graphic novel “Tex: The Valley of Terror,” the ailing perfectionist <PERSON> ached to do justice to the beloved character and spent four years past the original publication deadline buried in the work. And when he decided he was not satisfied with the quality of his horse drawings, he reached out <PERSON> for help. 260