Updates....

Some more recent art and sketches.

The first one is a promotional piece for Nerd Anti Zombie, the second novel by my dear friend Francesco Nucera.

The brief was to make an illustration that'll be printed on a t-shirt, featuring Bill Gates attacked by zombie Steve Jobs coming out of his grave.

My first sketches had a different layout

but upon seeng them, Francesco suggested to change the design in order to make it look like the cover of the first issue of Dylan Dog, an incredibly popular horror comic book in Italy.

This choice, perfectly understandable because it would add an additional intertextual reference and therefore reinforce the visual joke, posed a problem: having two real people in the picture required that I showed both faces, yet I needed Jobs to be the prominent zombie in the composition, if not the only one.

This meant I could not place him behind Bill Gates (it wouldn't be as menacing if relegated to the background) nor I could place him in front of him but also turned towards him.

I resolved that by making Jobs crawl out of his grave but unaware of the presence of his former Sylicon Valley competitor.

Bill Gates' pose, the tree and moon in the background are swiped in order to make the image a direct parody of the orignal. Hopefully Claudio Villa won't mind.

To complete the joke, I've colored the piece to replicate the original cover and added a logo in the same font.

And here you can see the finished product:

The following piece is a caricature of Italo Calvino

created as promotional art for an event.. I'm happy with the style, but I don't think I totally nailed the likeness...

I think I've done better with these other caricatures

Danny Elfman

Ennio Morricone

And since I really took a liking for caricatures people, I gave a shot to a couple of other movie-people

Steven Spielberg

Alexandre Desplat

These last two being only sketches at this point.

The following is my  most recent caricature, featuring composers/podcasters MArty and Will Brueggeman from the Underscore Podcast.

Sharing links: from Smoky Man's blog

SERGIO TOPPI: il Fumetto, l'Arte, Buzzati e il Giappone

Will Eisner

Recently visited the Will Eisner exhibit at the BSC in Brussels.

My companion during the visit was the always nice Steven De Rie, who was warned by some fellow cartoonist not to expect much from the exhibition, since most of the samples  came from a single private collection.

I ignore what kind of show this other cartoonist expected, but the exhibit was really well done.

Sure there was a relatively little from The Spirit to see (only a handful of splash-pages) but the selections form the master's later works such as Dropsie Avenue, The Name of the Game or A Contract with God were substantial and diverse (not to mention practically the complete The Dreamer, a book that holds a very special place in my heart).

The pieces were accompanied by large panels of commentaries from the curators and some printed magazines froma all over the world.

If any criticism can be made about the exhibition is the scarcity of prep material such as sketches and/or scripts (it would have been interesting to see how the Spirit stories were plotted, scripted and then realized, especially beacuse the process involved other artists or writers).

Some more photographs may have helped too and it would have been great to have a screen or two playing excerpts from the various Eisner docs that DO exist.

Anyway, this should not be missed by any comic book lover who has the chance to visit Brussels or its surroundings.

The exhibition lasts until March the 2nd 2014. Entrance fee is 8 euros, but it buys the access to the whole museum (which is always worth the price)

PS: very very very nice chit-chat with Steven De Rie after the visit about all things comics. 

Prisoners of Gravity

In my book, one of the absolute highlights in television history has been Prisoners of Gravity.
Originally aired on TVO, the Ontario public service channel, the show delved in sci-fi, speculative fiction and horror genres in literature and comics (film was touched upon, but not extensively), long before "geek culure"* became cool.


The array of talent interviewed for the show is simply staggering: Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, Peter Sraub, Harlan Ellison, Clive Barker, Terry Prachett, Doug Adams, Roger Zelazny, Samuel Delaney only to neme a few.

Those who would like te catch up with this well-aged piece of television can sink their teeth on this Youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/user/Teddog3000/videos

(a number of episodes used to be available at the TVO online archives, but once the agreements with the people interviewed expired had to be removed).

The host was comedian Rick Green, whe have since become one of my heroes for his work on AD(H)D.

Read here an interesting look back at the program by itys makers, appeared on WIRED.


* using this expression physically pains me.

Reflections: Growing Up With Music

A personal view about the music of John Williams and its role in my upbringing

This is a piece I wrote for the website thelegacyofjohnwilliams.com, curated by my brother Maurizio, who is doing  a remarkable job in "building a platform to celebrate and promote the cultural and aesthetic importance that the music of John Williams had (and it’s still having) on many people around the world".
I'm honored to having contributed the illustration for the header of the website, you can see here below.
Thanks to Maurizio for allowing me to me share my thoughts on his website.

As I am typing this, the sound of my son practicing scales on the piano resonates through the house.

I think back to my short-lived affair with the instrument.

I was about seven years old and I wanted to learn how to play piano from one of my older brothers, but he had just left to study in Rome. I was put under the tutelage of another teacher; whose lessons were tedious and devoid of the kind of fun I used to have around my brother. I quit after six months, a decision I still regret. But I wasn’t left without musical mentors.

Thinking of my older brother, a recent conversation we had springs to my mind about the different music teaching methods. He was telling me a funny anecdote involving an acquaintance of his, who wanted to educate his son outside of the western tonal system, to spare him from the conditioning imposed by our musical tradition, which puts certain intervallic relationships (like the tonic-dominant) above other possible modes. Ironically, this person’s efforts were made vain by the many nursery rhymes that the kid learned at school—nothing stick to our brains like simple, diatonic major melodies.

What’s the point of this story? Well not so much to discuss the pros and cons of equal temperament, but rather to point out how glad I am to be able to participate in the conversation. Because despite having given up on piano (or any other instrument for that matter) I’m not musically illiterate.

And for that I must thank John Williams.

Make no mistakes: I admit that the reason I gravitated towards Mr. Williams’ music were the movies he scored. Like many kids in the 1980s, I was utterly captivated by movies like Star Wars, Superman or E.T. They were perfectly executed pieces of fiction easy to fall in love with. Listening to those scores was a pathway to that sense of wonderment and excitement those movies provided.

But on repeated listening, the richness of these scores started to intrigue me. The dramatic drive of the pieces made the narrative clear, so I could tell at which point of the story I was listening to. The melodic writing made every moment memorable and singable. The rich instrumentation and length of the cues sustained my interest. So much that, as a teen ager, it took a long time to adjust my ears to the pop-music I was “supposed” to listen in the 1990s, to keep at pace with my schoolmates, who were into grunge, indie rock or Britpop.

But no matter how important John Williams music was to ignite my interest in music, you need teachers in flesh and blood to make the seed blossom.


Luckily, I had at least one: Umberto Bombardelli, a composer himself, who taught music at my middle school. He could have come right out of movies like Mr. Holland’s Opus or Goodbye, Mr. Chips—he even looked like Peter O’ Toole in that 1969 movie (with music adapted and conducted by John Williams, by the way).

At the time, music was a mandatory subject in Italy for students in middle school between the age of 11 and 14, but it was easily disregarded as an extra or a commodity, certainly not the subject that would make or break your graduation. However, Mr. Bombardelli taught passionately, with patience and humor, becoming soon known by his pupils as “the good teacher”.

He did a lot more than just make us play the recorder or put on Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. He made us listen to various type of music (from Palestrina to Demetrio Stratos and Luciano Berio), teaching us about the different musical periods and styles. He even showed us movies and made us pay attention to the music (The Blues Brothers, Walt Disney’s Fantasia and also the Williams-scored The Cowboys). To this day, I owe him for laying the foundations of any musical knowledge I may have.

As I grew up, I gravitated towards Romantic or Post-Romantic composers, whose works shared a lot of common traits with the type of film music me and my brother Maurizio learned to love, from John Williams to Jerry Goldsmith, Alan Silvestri and Danny Elfman. The two pieces that encouraged me to explore the very rich catalog of classical music were the symphonic suite from George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (the great London Symphony Orchestra recording conducted by the late great André Previn) and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade as recorded by Fritz Reiner with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for RCA (this one kindly recommended by my brother Alessandro).

We used to have a public radio station that aired classical music nonstop 24/7 (the so-called filodiffusione, which is now part of the bouquet of radio channels managed by the Italian national broadcasting service, a.k.a. RAI) and I was listening to it at every possible moment—I once spent two hours pretending to pay attention during a class in high school while I was listening to Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No.3 through an earpiece hidden in my hand (true story).


From there it has been a fantastic voyage through multi-colored soundscapes. A journey I still enjoy every day. Today I do not have to rely on a fortuitous encounter with a dedicated teacher or on state-owned radio stations, the internet made it possible to discover and share gems very easily.

But it all started thanks to John Williams. And his music still works magnificently as gateway to musical appreciation.

In the meantime, the sound of scales has been swapped for more familiar tunes, as my son now plays the “Flying Theme” from E.T. and then “The Imperial March”, and then the Theme from Schindler’s List. I hear him stumble or hitting a wrong note here and there, but the pleasure he has in playing the music is palpable. Since I showed him Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie, he became a big fan, so much so that he asked for the sheet music as present for Christmas. Even my wife, who does not care much about film music (but who has, unlike me, stuck to her piano lessons and CAN actually play the thing) is starting to warm up to Williams’s infectious tunes.

My mind wanders again: I now think of a painting one of my art teachers once did. It was called Music, a gift from heaven. It depicts a mandolin and a dove, against puffy clouds.

It was well drawn, but incredibly cheesy. But I do share the feeling.

And whether this gift comes from gods, from heaven or from nature, I will forever be grateful to Mr. Williams for delivering it to me.

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The video here below, put together by composer Austin Wintory reflects many of the same feelings.