Edited by Vincenzo Mollica & Antonio Vianovi (Glamour International Productions)
No ISBN
A lot of people may find the graphic arts collections under review here to be shocking, unacceptably violent and even revolting or, worse yet, dirty.
If that’s you, please stop right here and come back tomorrow when there will something you’ll approve of but will almost certainly offend someone else.
Italy has a rich and varied comics culture with some highbrow classics and lots and lots of cheap, cheerful, cheesy and even sordid commercial filler – just like everywhere else. Italian illustration superstar Gaetano “Tanino†Liberatore, like most masters of the form, paid his dues and worked his way up the ranks until he eventually found stardom, infamy and his ideal working environment…
He was born in 1953 in Quadri in the province of Chieti. After the usual kind of artistic childhood the kid went to school in Pescara and studied architecture at the University of Rome before moving into the world of work as an advertising illustrator in 1975.
He first met his fellow philosophical seditionist and punk-soul brother (writer, artist and publisher) Stefano Tamburini in 1978 and, in conjunction with strident activist cartoonist Andrea Pazienza, they created ‘Rankxerox’ for the magazine Cannibale. The character evolved and moved to Il Male and eventually Frigidaire, fully realised now as the RanXerox we know today – every bit Libertore’s signature character the way Eisner has The Spirit, and Hergé Tintin…
Liberatore rapidly developed as both artist and writer, with strips ‘Bordello’ and ‘Client’ appearing in Il Male, but when the new, Tamburini-scripted, syndicated RanXerox became a star of French magazine L’Écho des Savanes in 1981, Tanino moved to Paris and began working simultaneously on tales for the more prestigious Gallic market in such magazines as Tranfert, Métal Hurlant, À Suivre and Chic.
A shocking hit in the US Heavy Metal magazine, RanXerox then led to Liberatore jumping the pond and producing material for Twisted Tales and men’s magazine Hustler.
When Tamburini died suddenly in 1986, Liberatore quit comics for nearly a decade. Returning to straight commercial illustration, he worked in movies and designed book and record covers. Eventually, comics captured his attention again, and he produced two new RanXerox tales in 1993 and 1996 (with Jean-Luc Fromental and Alain Chabat), and a piece in Batman Black and White, assorted covers, and illustrated Pierre Pelot and Yves Coppens’s mass-market paperback ‘Le Rêve de Lucy’. As the Nineties closed, he finally came storming back in stunning style with the brilliant, award-winning Lucy L’Espoir in 2007, in which he and writer Patrick Norbert freely adapted a life-story for the famous prehistoric humanoid Australopithecus Afarensis remains found by anthropologists Coppens, Donald Johanson and Maurice Taieb.
The early Liberatore is the unqualified master of shock tactics. His beautifully rendered work dwells with obsessive, aggressive fascination of the grotesque, both visually and thematically. Stylish elegance goes hand-in-hand with horrifying, blunt scarification, in-your-face casually acceptable deformity and abnormality as suave, raffish he-men readily range beside hideous human travesties, ugly children and wanton, fearsome under-age harlots and murderous junkies.
His worlds are not ones where anybody should feel safe or comfortable in visiting…
One fascinating fact often neglected is that the artist usually drew his stunning pages same-size or even smaller than the printed final work – a complete reversal of the regular way comics were produced – and used a huge variety of materials to achieve his artistic effects, from cheap felt pens to high quality pencils, paints or markers and even lipstick and found objects…
That spectacular facility for experimentation is perfectly displayed in the book under review here. In the early 1980s the Italian outfit which produced Popular Arts magazine Glamour Illustrated released a series of phenomenal art-books, collecting and cataloguing the extant works of many modern maestros of mature modern sequential narrative which had limited distribution in Britain – despite the best efforts of specialist importer Titan Distributors – and all those tomes are long past due for revision and reissuing…
This glorious collection of Liberatore’s early years, simultaneously transcribed in Italian, French and English, gathers hundreds of works and excerpts within its 204 pages (many of them full-colour high-gloss inserts), traces the artistic development and displays the incredible ability and versatility of this incomparable, iconoclastic stylist, divided as usual into early ‘Unpublished Works’, ‘Black and White’ – printed pieces and extracts ranging from comics pages and panels, pin-ups, ads, illustrations, posters and covers – and concluding extensive ‘Colour’ section.
The ‘Unpublished Works’ section here include masses of Liberatore’s superb pencil drawings and preliminary sketches, unfinished and self- rejected pages as well as commercial designs, calendars, and a ton of fanzine work dedicated to music sensations such as Frank Zappa, Paul McCartney, Grateful Dead and so on, choreographed fight scenes and designs for every aspect of his finished pieces and is capped by an extra ‘Donne’ chapter featuring a stunning sequence of pencil studies of women…
‘Black and White’ contains a wealth of work showing the artist’s fantastic versatility as seen in record jackets, magazine covers and illustration, satirical comics and cartoons plus loads of strips for publications as varied as Cannibale, Il Male, Frigidaire, Transfert, RanXerox and a host of others.
The ‘Colour’ section reveals, in a wealth of different hues and stylisations, his canon of covers for comics, magazines, books and records; posters, cartoons, works in progress, strips, stage art for theatrical performances, paintings, along with many pages and extracts from his strips produced in Italy and France, and American works for Hustler, Heavy Metal and Marvel’s Savage Sword of Conan.
The collection also contains impressively comprehensive checklists which detail in full Liberatore’s vast publication record to date in their ‘Chronology’ and ‘Bibliography’ sections.
As you would expect, there is a breathtaking amount of beautifully rendered flesh and deeply unsettling hyper-violence and subversive visual political polemic on display – and I’m sure I don’t know which is the most distressingly affecting – in an unrelenting series of lascivious situations and occasionally genuinely disturbing circumstances… and his brutally sly sense of humour.
Liberatore is another world-class storyteller English speakers have too long been deprived of, and books like this have never been more desperately in need of updating and re-release …
No copyright notice again so I’m assuming:
© 1972-1985 Gaetano Liberatore. All rights reserved. If anybody knows better please let me know and we’ll amend the entry.