Superwest Comics

By Massimo Mattioli (Catalan Communications)
ISBN: 0-87416-035-9

Writer/artist Massimo Mattioli was born in 1943 and grew up in an Italy rapidly rebuilding after cataclysmic social and military upheaval. He started his comic career in 1965 with the strips Il Ragnato Gigi, Ipo, Rita e Pino and Vermetto Sigh in Italy’s Il Vittorioso magazine. Before the end of the decade he was in “swinging London” working primarily for men’s magazines such as Mayfair, Penthouse and Plexus.

He moved to Paris and created M. le Magicien for Pif and worked on Le Canard Sauvage before settling again in Italy. For the newspaper Paese Sera he created Pasquino and was a regular in Il Gionaliono for more than two decades. But his work wasn’t only safe and mainstream. He co-founded the alternative magazine Il Cannibale and created Lucertola, Gatto Gattino and the impressive SF strip Joe Galaxy, which migrated to his own magazine Frigidaire alongside his Friske the Frog and the infamous Squeak the Mouse.

One day I’d like to review some of those series if they ever make it to an English edition, but until then let’s content ourselves with another contentious and controversial Frigidaire alumni: Superwest Comics.

Released to America at the end of the 1980s, Superwest is a broad but incisive parody of superheroes and anti-capitalist treatise from an insightful and bold stylist with a highly subversive, wickedly funny point to make. Looking like a blend of Disney villains and the gentle Disney superhero parody SuperGoof, but rendered in thirties animation style, our rat-like hero swallows a power-pill and gains incredible abilities to defend the masses.

Boldly experimental, iconoclastic with scant regard for scary copyright lawyers and strictly for adults, this volume translates and presents ‘Panic in the City’, ‘Porno Massacre’, ‘Cartoons Hold-Up’, ‘Scanner’, ‘The Shadow’ and the wildly experimental ‘Very Hot Dogs/100 Werewolves/The Wild Night’, with faux covers and feature pages tossed in for free. It is ironic, brash and wickedly funny.

I want more and so I suspect will you…

© 1987 Massimo Mattioli. All Rights Reserved. English language edition © 1987 Catalan Communications.