Saturday, January 29, 2011

Italy's Don Martin

Saturday Jacovitti Day.

Recently I have been rediscovering the work of Italian artist Benito Jacovitti. His very funny strip Cocco Bill in the Dutch comic weekly Pep, which I read with a lot of enthousiasm, but he did lot and lots more terrific work. In 1968 and 1969 he did a whole page feature for one of the Italian photo weeklies. It was called Popjac, which I can only assume is some sort of pun using his name and the words Fox Populi, meaning The Voice of the People (but I was wrong, see the comments). It had a different lay-out every week and always featured a lot of gags as well as something with an everyman character called Guiseppi. I spend some time today translating one of the pages I have scanned in myself from it's magazine into Dutch and decided that it was so much fun to do, that I want to try and do it in English and every week. So, come back here during this week to see an English language version of this page. Till now, you will have to make do with Dutch... and Jacovitti's wonderful art.

As promised, I have replaced the Dutch translation with an English one. I have also added the article that accompanied the first Popjac in the Januari 30, 1968 issue of La Domenica del Corriere, which I will show next week. Anyone out there who can provide me with a translation of this piece?


3 comments:

fortunato said...

No "vox populi".
Pop Jac came from Pop-Art.

POP JAC and GIUSEPPE were published on weekly magazine "La Domenica del Corriere" (The Sunday of the Courier) in 1968/70.

Ger Apeldoorn said...

Of course. Maybe the piece I have added will explain that.

paolop said...

Great! As a great jac-fan living out of Italy, I was longing for someone who could bring his wonderful art to people living abroad.
Dank U vel!