Fumetti Classico

Sunday Italian Classic Day.

 I am a huge fan and collector of Italian master Jacovitti's very funny comic strips. Apart from creaing characters as Cocco Bill and Zorry Kid and illustrtaing classics such as inocchio and the Kama Sutra, he also drew a lot of absurd cartoons and silent gag strips. Hre are some I have ready for posting (with more from Imagao to come). If you follow the link, you will also find a couple of pages from the Domenica del Correira, which I translated and shared here years ago. Many of those have textless gags, too.

 

Re Cocco Revival

Saturday Leftover Day.

For a couple of years former Jacovitti assistant Luca Salvagne drew new adventures of Cocco Bill. I bet most of you haven't seen these. He will be doing a special new Cocco Bill story in Italy next year, his first long story about Cocco Bill ten years later, around the turn of the century. A sort of Once Upon A Time Amoung The Salamis.

Jacovittimo!

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Italian comic artist Jacovitti is one of the greatest talents his country ever produced. In a country where all forms of humor seem to be either for Disney or influenced by Disney in some way, he carved a way and a look for himself with a unique style. I came across and read his strips from 1968 to 1974, but he had been going for a long time before that. It wasn't until I looked at his earlier work I saw where he got his inspiration - his unique style was based on his love for the work of Elsie Segar of Popeye fame! Anyway, I got as much of his work as possible (which was not very hard, because a lot of it was and is still being reprinted). But this is not from those, this is from some of the magazines in which he published his series in the fifties. When I got a few I found out he did not inly do those famous stories of his, he also did covers, one-off gag strips and full page ads series for several products. here are a couple from my own collection. Three months of a monthly calendar he did in 1956 for a product called Althea. And one he did for Nestlé, which seems to have been one of his regular clients in the late fifties and early sixties (I just don't have that many of those magazines).

Io Sono Quello Che Sono

Friday Comic Book Day.

Draery weather out here. Time for some Italian levity by Benito Jacovitti. Did you know he developed his trademark style from his love of Popeye's Elsie Segar?

Pip Pip Hurray

Saturday Leftover Day.

All through the fifties Benito Jacovitti's main hero was called Pippo. He had all sorts of adventures, but sometimes the Italian master dabbled in science fiction as well. Later he went on to do mainly cowboy and crime strips, but the wild, wild humor stayed the same. here are the first three pages of Pippo in the Year 2000. Translation, anyone?

Cip, Cip, Hurray!

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

I don't usually link to other blogs. Not out of disrespect, there are many good bloogers I follow, but out of a strong sense of obligation to bring you new and original material. But today I am dopping my obsessive standards and want to urge to go and check out a recent post by my interfriend Smurfsmacker. Our tastes run along the same lines in many ways (he is currently doing a series of posts featuring the first year of George Wunder's Terry and the Pirates in color for instance), but some time ago he did something I wold want to be able to do: he copied and translated a whole story from an early series by Benito Jacovitti. Go and have a laugh and see how much the Italian Funmaster was infuenced by Elsie Segar.

By the way, Smurf, if you are reading this: I have at least one of these stories in color and almost all of Cip's later incarnation from the seventies, when Jacovitti did who dunnit stories with him and Zagar. All ready and waiting to be translated.

A Man And His Devil

Saturday Leftover Day.

It's been some tme since I have shown some of Benito Jacovitti's work. Mostly because all I have is in Italian. I wish I could present this in English, but that would take to long right now. So enjoy the art or ask an Italian friend to help out. This is from Jacovitti's golden period of 1966 to 1974, when he produced several top notch series all at once.

Italian Don

Saturday Leftover Day

Another gem from 'the Italian Don Martin'.

The Other Benito

Monday Cartoon Day.

On the pages I have been showing here by Italian artist Benito Jacovitti he often uses an everyman figure to react to all the absurdities of modern life depicted in his gags. After that, he used the figure in a series of silent strips and called him Guiseppe. But thatw as not the first time he used that name (or even some of the gags). In the fifties, while he was doing his regular one or two pages of strips for the weekly El Vittorioso, for a short time he submitted small silent gags with a similar but different everyman figure that were used on the cover as well as some of the insides. In some of the gags, he called that figure Guiseppe as well. There can't have been too many, but they were all as delightfully absurd, shwoing why I have called this atist The Italian Don Martin (ven though he started earlier than Mad's Maddest Artist did).

Silent Puns

Saturday Jacovitti Day.

Speechless

Saturday Jacovitti Day.

The Silent Italian

Saturday Jacovitti Day.

Italian Crisis

Jacovitti Saterday.

As I said last week, after Popjac had run it's course, Jacovitti turned it's hero Giuseppe into the subject of a daily strip. I believe this ran for about a year, although I have no idea where. I would love to see a collection of it, but even though much of Jacovitti's work has been reprinted, this hasn't. Some of these strips were used in the Dutch comic magazine Pep, which I read as a teen.