Roberto

I do not remeber the specifics, I believe it had to do with my Jorge Zaffino Google Gallery, but a few years back I got acquainted over the internet with artist Roberto Zaghi.

Born and raised in Ferrara (and sporting a decisively recognizable accent from that region) and now lving in my own native Milan, Roberto begun his apprenticeship as a cartoonist by accident.

Quite literally: he was involved in a motobike crash which left him badly injured. While convalescent, Roberto rekindled his interest in comics, which he had abandoned since childhood in favor of studying electronics and chemistry.

Once he re-started drawing (something he previously only did for his own pleasure) he never stopped again.

He had some fine menthors in Germano Bonazzi and Nicola Mari, both affirmed pro's in Italy's comic scene.

Beside his obvious talent and passion, Roberto must have an incredible work ethic that make him commit to the drawing board many hours a day. To me that shows not only in the volume of his output, but also in his evolution.

If one compares his earlier art, clearly influenced by Nicola Mari, with his latest pages, sketches and commissions, the evolution is remarkable.

Proof that talent without commitment is useless as a bicycle with no handle.

Roberto is also high on my list of favourites because he likes all the right stuff. He has a soft spot for a lot of the old masters who produced solid, realistic work with flare and panache (Leonard Starr, José Luis Garcia-Lopez and most of all Alex Toth, who I started appreciating thanks to Roberto).

For someone who loves Jorge Zaffino, Roberto has a surprisingly polished, clean style (which I admire a lot).

He is also a very generous person, who will always find the time to reply to a mail or a phone call or engaging in an excange on Facebook.

He appears to be very modest as well: his only goal is to illustrate the story in the best way possible, with the reader in mind and very little ego.

To me, he is the quintessential gentleman professional of popular comics.

You can admire his work at the following links:

http://robertozaghi.blogspot.com/

https://www.instagram.com/robertozaghi/

http://robertozaghi.tumblr.com/

Coming up: STROKE.

Stroke is one of the two upcoming digital publications by the Flemish Indipendent Cartoonists Guild (De Vlaamse Onafhankelijk Stripgilde).
the magazine is edited by Peter Moernhout, who was kind enough to ask me to contribute to the first issue.

I'm proud to announce that my short story A Robin's Dream will be featured in this new (and hopefully succesful) editorial enterprise.

I conceived this 7-page-long-homage-slash-satyre to Batman and Robin (hence the title) almost 8 years ago, working on a suggestion sparked by an Alan Moore interview.
I cannot remember how I went from the initial concept to the final script. I believe it came all out pretty quickly, with every idea leading to the next and fitting nicely into the narrative (except for the ending, which I still find weak), but I probably simply just forget many of the problems I encountered while making it.

The Superdickery website (an hilarious collection of oddities from the pages of superhero comics, especially Superman and Batman titles between the 50's and the 70's) came in handy, providing many of the jokes and references and allowing me to be, in a nasty way, very faithful to the original material.

A Robin's Dream stayed an "unproduced script" and collected bytes of dust on my hard drive for a couple of years, when I pulled it from my files and decided to go further. Still, it did not make it very far until I decided to submit it to the Guild's Plastieken Plunk contest, where it came to Peter's attention.
My story did not make it to the podium, so I've "parked" it on the internet (it's still visible through my Facebook and Google+ profiles) waiting for a way to promote it.
Finally Peter gave me tha chance to publish it. I had to give some final touches and I was indecided whether to put the Alan Moore quote at the begginig of the story or leave it out. I've decided for the latter, beacuse it felt a little pretentious. Besides, the point of the story was to carry out the spirit of Moore's statement by means of a comic book story. Having the quote as well was a little redundant as if I didn't trust my storytelling skills.
So here we are. The magazine should be available on the App Store and other digital platforms in September.
Peter asked me to provide a note about the author (myself) and a link. Faced again witht he fact I have no website of my own, I've decided to put this blog's address as "the link".

Now I'm kind of obliged to update this as frequently as I can, and in English.


I leave you with an unused sketch for the story.

PS: before you ask me, here's Alan Moore's quote, taken from
"Comic Book Artist" issue 25 , published in 2003

“In a way, I beleive that the majority of super-heroes, if you boil them down, are nothing more than a name and a chest emblem. Let's take Batman, for exapmle. There is no resemlance between the avenging Batman created in the Thirties, the smiling avuncular Batman of the Fifties, the grim/tense/taut Batman of Neal Adams in the Seventies and Frank Miller's dark knight of the Eighties. These are not the same person. The only constant is the name and the chest emblem.
I mean, who cares about continuity, really?”

next time: Alan Moore's kikckstarter campaign or "How I wish I had more money".

Jorge Zaffino

Jorge ZAffino

I have already written about him in a previous post, but I'd like to spend some more words on this great and prematurely gone artist.

Jorge Zaffino was born in Argentina in 1960 and, according to the sites I have visited, lived there all his life.

At the age of 16, he began working as an unpaid apprentice at the comics studios of Ricardo and Enrique Villagran.

He's been introduced to american audineces with Winterworld, a fantasy saga (that from what I read seem to share some story element with the french-belgian "Niege" saga) written by Chuck Dixon.
With Dixon, Zaffino will realize the majority of his american work.
He died of an £Heart attack in 2002, aged 42.

Ok, this was his bio. But what I want to talk abut is his impact on me.

For starters, I did not like his art at first. In 1994; aged 14, I was exposed to one of his best works. It was a 45-page one-shot for Epic,the creator-owned division of Marvel comics, featuring material aimed to a mature readers, called Seven Block.

It was publihed in Itlay on the pages of the anthologic Star Magazine published by Star Comics.
For accuracy's sake, I should point out that issue 17 of StarMag (as called by its readers) dates back to 1992, but I became a regular reader only by issue 18.
I bought #17 later in a comic book shop, and my attention was all for Sub-City by Todd McFarlane, published in the same issue.

(Sub-City was McFarlane's last Spiderman story before he left Marvel to create Spawn, the shortly lived Image Comics and the succesful McFarlane Toys).

Time did justice: I regard now Sub-City as one of the dumbest things I'v ever read. Worse even than MacFarlane's debut as a writer: Torment, where at least he tried to create a style and to a convey sense of, well, torment.

I'm trerribly off-track now.

That to say that I skipped Seven Block entirely and did not read it for another year or two: no super heroes, acid colors, too dark, too realistic.
I liked bright coloured comic books where heroes where clearly defined.
I liked John Byrne, Neal Adams, John Romita, Kevin Maguire, Mike Zeck...
I could appriciate The Last Hunt of Kraven or The Dark Knight Returns because they featured my favorite heroes. But Seven Block? It looked like the art was xeroxed several times: gritty, rough and black.

Then came Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk was a role-playing game from the '90s. the setting was a distopian urban future, a cocktail that blended all apocaliptic visions of the future of authors like Philip K. Dick, Williams Gibson, Rod Serling, and a plethora of films like Blade Runner, Mad Max, Escape from N.Y., Soylent Green, The Terminator, as well as mangas and/or animes like Akira, The Ghost in the Shell and so on.

I used to play this role-playing game with my friends and we spent hours and hours pretending to be hitmen, clandestine doctors or drug dealers in the near future, where guns and women were available for a reasonable price.

Andrea S., who as game master had essentially to come up with all the plots, organized a whole series of story arcs worth of a prime-time TV series; those story ideas, combined with our style of playing (we were keener on acting than on rolling multi-faceted dices to see who would win a fight) did the rest.

Am I off track again?
Maybe, but let me continue.

The rest I'm referring to is the realization that if put down on paper, our adventures would be relly fun to read. I came to this realization after a prticular tense scene: my friends had to kill one of our team in order to save me (well they did non have to but...).
The gruesome resolution to that scene had potential for a great comic book moment.
I started putting down on paper the chronicle of what happend to us and a lot of the anecdotes that made our playing sessions memorable and started taking seriously in consideration the idea of submitting the material.

I do not know if what we had was good, but I'm still convinced it could be a fun story to read.

At one point I had to figure out what the art should look like.

The kind of story we were playing, more than to mangas or Mad Max, made me think to The X-Files and Pulp Fiction.
I also envisioned a non-linear storytelling in order to create as many plot twists and cliffhangers as possible (I would say that the thing that now comes closer to it would be LOST), but I needed a style to match.

Our characters were not square-jawed paladines, but flawed cinics who did a lot of mistakes (and yes who could also do very cool stuff).

Looking for references I went throught my collection of comic books, and that creepy looking story by Dixon and Zaffino called Seven Block came to mind. Even though I never really read that story, those panels somehow grew on me.
I slipped the magazine out of the shelf and digged in to the story.

Boy, was I mistaken the first time around!

The plot itself is very much like an episode from the first season of The X-Files. A confined location, a lot of atmosphear, little gore (it may be filmed on a shoestring budget, and I mean that as a compliment) a creepy ending.

But the art! The art was simply beautiful. Being an art student by then, and having to deal with drawing from life every day, I was the able to see what Jorge Zaffino was doing with his rough, sketchy style.

What stroke me was that compared to a lot of other argentinian or italian artists who drew with a similar "impressionist" technique where the shapes are defined by shadows and light rather than by lines, he had a "solidness" a presence I usually did not associate with this style.

I think of Hugo Pratt, Venturi, Ivo Milazzo.
The only fair equivalents I could find were John Buscema (when he did Conan) and maybe Alberto Breccia, but both were a lot more "baroque". Maybe Al Williamson, who inks in a much more polished way though, or Tanino Liberatore, who is a lot less skilled in composiotion and storytelling.

One last artist that comes to mind would be Danijel Zezelj, but im my opinion his art is a lot less lively than Jorge's.

(Do not get me wrong, I love all of the above and I think they all are great artists, but on some lenghts Zaffino seemed to beat them all -still in my opinion)

Jorge seemed to have it all: a solid classic background, knowledge of anatomy and realism, a fresh style, not caged by pointless nice artistic gestures, an uncommon sense for composition (the balance in many of his pages is worth being studied) and amazing stoytelling craft: what happens is very clear on the page.

The sketches I relized for that old project were not reminiscent of Zaffino. The project itself has been put in to an artificial coma for years now, awaiting the right moment to surface (as we get closer to the year the story itself was set).

But a similar thing happened again, when I bagan to toy with the idea of another project (with Alessandro Q).

At first I ordered some of his works on Amazon. then I started looking for news about him on the internet, only to find out he sadly passes away already seven years ago, leaving two sons and a wife.

This is may late tribute to an artist's artist. Someone who may be shamefully forgotten, beacuse of a relatively small body of work, but who left a strong impression on a lot of other artists.

On his website (still on line) you'll find some word from other artists who worked with him and who do remember him fondly.

I leave you with a drawing from his last little story for DC (once agin by Chuck Dixon) that you can find on the first volume of Betman Black and White.

This 8-page jewel is a perfect example of what I mean.

Batman and a never-so-beautyfully-drawn Commissioner Gordon look new and classic at the same time. He capture them is realistic poses, without taking the magic away from them. A trick only David Mazzucchelli managed to succeed into in Batman Year One.

Secondo capitolo della mia personale guida al meglio del web-per-chi-ha-tempo-da-perdere.
Come accennavo in un post precedente, ciò che genera nausa nel Web è il rincorrersi di commenti, risposte e riciclaggi che proliferano con velocità virale.
Hai un'idea divertente? Il giornodopo è già presa, smontata, copiata, commentata, masticata e sputata.
Ci sarebbe da arrendersi.
Per questo sono rimasto sorpreso della piccola quantità di inchiostro versata riguardo Michael Argusso, noto con il modesto nome di “ItsJustSomeRandomGuy” o ancora più semplicemente “Random Guy” (letteralmente: “Tizio qualunque” o meglio “un tizio a caso”) e dalla esigua serie di imitazioni-omaggi-riletture che il suo materiale ha avuto.

Si badi, non è passato inosservato: i suoi video sono stati cliccati MILIONI di volte, il suo canale vanta una alta posizione per numero di abbonati su Youtube dove, visto il numero di utenze, qualsiasi posizione a due cifre può considerarsi un successo.

Forse complice una sua certa ritrosia dell'autore a parlare di sè se non attraverso i suoi filmati, di lui non si trovano che poche notizie sparse.
Allora ne parlo io, convinto che il buon lavoro vada premiato.

Argusso ha cominciato da una parodia (sì, anche lui).
Prendendo spunto dalla celebre e riuscita campagna pubblicitaria Get A Mac della Apple, già soggetto di numerose riletture, il ventisettenne americano ha cominciato a inscenare piccoli sketch che vedono protagonisti diversi supereroi delle due maggiori concorrenti americane Marvel e DC.



L'approccio è lo-tech: Argusso non fa altro che tenere in mano di fronte alla camera del proprio computer alcuni pupazzetti dei suddetti eroi.
Non c'è l'ombra di animazione passo uno.
Siamo quasi dalle parti del fotoromanzo, per dare una vaga ilusione di movimento Argusso cambia la posizione dei personaggi da un'inquadratura all'altra.
Quello che manca in effetti speciali è però compensato dall'ottima capacità di Argusso nel creare le caratterizzazioni vocali dei personaggi (spesso basate sulle voci degli attori che hanno interpretato i vari ruoli negli ultimi anni) e dal suo frizzante senso of humor.
Quanto sia difficile scrivere buoni dialoghi comici a “botta e risposta” che siano spigliati oltre che effettivamente divertenti per contenuto e “delivery” fatevelo dire da chiunque lo fa di mestiere.

Nei primi video della serie Superman si vede costretto ad ammettere, di fronte ad un imbarazzato Spider-man, la supremazia strategica nel marketing da parte della rivale Marvel, soprattutto nella gestione delle cosiddette movie-franchise.
GLi spot della Apple sono copiati per struttura ed in effetti ciò che fa ridere è la applicabilità della stessa formula ad un contesto completamente diverso (lì i computer, qui i film di supereroi)
A poco a poco si è visto aumentare il numero dei personaggi, tutti rigorosamente presi dalle pagine a fumetti: Batman, I Fantastici 4 e via aumentando.
Ironizzando sia sul contenuto delle storie a fumetti deipersonaggi, sia sulle spasmodiche attese dei fan per il prossimo hit cinematografico Argusso è esploso in una serie di divertentissime battute che si sono presto trovate strette nella formula "Apple".



La scena si sposta in un bar: scopriamo così che i supereroi vivono in una specie di cartoonia sospesa tra il mondo reale e quello delle loro storie a fumetti. Le loro identità e i loro poteri sono quelli che conosciamo, così come il loro carattere e le loro vicende personali, ma anche per loro i film sono film.

In una specie di "dopo lavoro", i diversi eroi si incontrano, parlano dei loro problemi, dei film su di loro e degli attori scelti per impersonarli, hanno le loro frustrazioni e le loro presunzioni, si innamorano.
Nascono invidie sulla base del regista chiamato al dirigere la prossima pellicola o sul successo monetario dell'ultimo capitolo.
Una nota amara si aggiunge quando gli stessi eroi si rendono conto di essere inverosimili, o peggio irrilevanti, oppure di avere passati davvero tragici, in un gioco totalmente autoreferenziale e squisitqmente scoperto.

Nonostante l'autore abbia col tempo dato maggiore attenzione alla confezione dei suoi filmati, con l'aiuto di una paziente fidanzata che realizza prop o vestiti di scena, la tecnica è rimasta molto semplice. E ci va bene così, perchè la qualità della scrittura nel frattempo è rimasta costante, anzi è migliorata.

Dopo primi sketch autoconclusivi Argusso è passato a realizzare interi archi narrativi di sei-otto episodi senza mai perdere di vista gli ormai numerosissimi personaggi che popolano la serie e utilizzando alcuni spunti marginali, anche piccoli, come trampolino per storie o gag successive.



Non vi racconto cosa è accaduto finora, per non togliervi il piacere della visione, ma per stuzzicare la vostra curiosità vi dico solo che al momento la seconda serie è cominciata: L'Uomo-Ragno tenta di diventare il sidekick di Batman, il Green Goblin è sotto allucinogeni mentre i buoni sembrano essere diventati i cattivi...



Il successo di Argusso sulla rete ha portato gli organizzatori della New York Comic Con a dedicargli un piccolo panel durante la manifestazione e gli ha chiesto di realizzare alcuni spot destinati al web per promuovere l'evento (la Marvel che nel frattempo ha notato il giovane ha dato il permesso all'uso dei propri personaggi)

In effetti la domanda che nasce spontanea è: “quanto ci metteranno editori di fumetti o stazioni TV ad accorgersi del talento di questo ragazzo e a dargli qualche idea da sviluppare?”
Senz'altro ha dimostrato di saper scrivere dialoghi, di saper caratterizzare i personaggi, di conoscerne sia la psicologia che la mitologia e si saper creare un intreccio.
Resta da vedere se il ragazzo sia in grado di scrivere anche altri generi e altri personaggi oppure se, ma questo lo ritengo improbabile, non sia assolutamente disinteressato a possibili patti faustiani col mondo dello show business e che si “accontenti” di regalare divertimento gratis ad un fedele (e crescente) seguito.
Purtroppo la frequenza dei filmati non è altissima, ma può anche darsi che Argusso abbia di meglio da fare che giocare con i pupazzetti, o che qualcosa stia bollendo in pentola)...