Il Giorno
By Piero Lotito
Milan, March 27, 2017 - Just look at the photos. The arms
on the table, the pen dipped in Indian ink, a sheet partially drawn a revolver
on a printed page. And just the expression of his face to understand the nature
of volcanic joy by one of the most brilliant designers of the world of comics:
Benito Jacovitti, born in Termoli March 9, 1923 and died in Rome December 3,
1997, ahead of a few hours his wife Floriana Jodice. The photographer frames
him - inventor of a hilarious army of bizarre characters and pyrotechnics -
laughing. And not to give in to the impulse, he pretends to be concerned about
the success of the comic sketched there. The revolver? It's fake, he needs like
an iron crafter for when, at noon, with his friend Nevio Zeccara, also a cartoonist
and a fan of westerns, the house will simulate a battle between cowboys, with a
hand ready to pull out the colt from his pocket. What will people say?
"They are crazy!", Because in the 1950s they would have been thought
to be terrorists.
Extraordinary Jacovitti, which drew his arm holding his
daughter Silvia to make her laugh a bit '. Sixty years ago, March 28, 1957, his
tender and clownish drawings gave to Giorno dei ragazzi, a weekly insert of our
newspaper, the first amazing adventures of Cocco Bill, a lanky, nervous gunman
drinking chamomile tea and riding a horse named Trottalemme, who thinks and
smokes and talks, gallops in a fascinating surreal absurd West, where it is to
smoke and drink sarsaparilla from morning to night, where the fish fly and from
the floor emerge snails and snakes in the cylinders, and where the grassland is
dotted with snow-white femurs and other bones, as well as well-cut on the bias
salami and red and yellow fish bones. The success was overwhelming, and Jac
(one of his signatures, along with "Fishbone") would always boast of
a not insignificant detail: "Every Thursday, when he went out with the
supplement Cocco Bill, the print run of Il Giorno It increased of 40-50
thousand copies."
At the newspaper, was born a year earlier, April 21,
1956, by Enrico Mattei, the founder. Jac had first experimented with a
character of fiction, Gionni Galaxy, then inventing Tom Nosy,
journalist-detective. But they were testing stages of his approach. And when
the director of Il Giorno, Gaetano Baldacci, asked him "Do something about
the West", he churned out Cocco Bill, the character who would give a boost
to his already impressive career (he designed the first story in 1940 with
"Goofy and the British", and he had long cooperated with the Catholic
weekly the Victorious, even creating the hugely popular Diario Vitt). The
ramshackle and irresistible western character Cocco Bill soon became a
prodigious cultural phenomenon, a kind of antechamber of the spaghetti western,
a launch pad in key wonderfully humorous ways the "West of the
beggars" - as defined by the same Jacovitti - then it was consecrated on
the screen by Sergio Leone.
Cocco Bill galloped on Trottalemme in Il Giorno until
1968. His inexhaustible author, meanwhile, had created a host of other
characters, here we try to quote in bulk, taking no account of history: the Arcipoliziotto
Cip, Cucù e Chicchirichì, Gamba di Quaglia, Spaccavento, Lolita Dolcevita,
Elviro il Vampiro, Baby Tarallo, Tizio, Caio e Sempronio, Zorry Kid, Jak Mandolino,
il diavoletto tentatore Pop Corn, Tarallino, Checco, Gionni Peppe, Joe Balordo.
In short, compared to the creative effervescence of Jacovitti, Etna mouth has
always been little more than a damp squib. They could not, the Molise genius,
not to get groped by the monument of literature of all time which is Pinocchio,
illustrating it in several editions: the first in 1943, then re-issued for
about twenty years.
Newsrooms were frequented by Jac? Since then, the capital
for the above reasons, Il Giorno to those of the Catholic newspaper Daily, The
Pouring of ideas, Corriere small, Night, Today, The European, Domenica del
Corriere, Linus, The Newspaper of Edizioni San Paolo. Continually
"rediscovered" as is done with the classics, for these first 60 years
of the ineffable Jacovitti Cocco Bill will be repeated in many different ways.
He will laugh, taste, or he will contain the expression that we have described,
perhaps thinking: "Here I would like a nice Tazzona chamomile! Gnaffe and
birignaffe."
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