Andrea Pazienza
Le Straordinarie Avventure di Pentothal

THE REVIEW

Here is a true cornerstone of literature in images.

The "Zenith Point" of Italian comics. From here on, comics as commonly understood (linear stories about adventures or topics for young people) will never be the same again.

Pentothal (Milano Libri Edizioni) is the debut work (in some ways still raw and inconsistent) of a very young and already disillusioned Andrea Pazienza, who narrates his dreams, illusions, and contradictions within the context of the 1977 political movement in a Bologna that was then politically very active and in constant ferment.

The presence of politics is always latent among the deconstructed, fragmented, and misaligned panels of an author already tormented by a thousand questions and few answers. It seems there are no longer any rules in these innovative panels where an air of “Free Anarchy” is breathed without frameworks or limitations of any kind.

The drawing also follows this fundamental principle: it starts Walt Disney-like, becomes tormented, mature, with echoes of Munch's Scream here and there, citations from Mantegna, influences of Andy Warhol, dotted screen patterns like Roy Lichtenstein, airy hatching in the style of Moebius, ranging from sacred to profane in a few square centimeters before reverting to playful with a funny and comic line, disregarding stylistic coherence or unity: a drawing that simply serves as a spokesperson for the Author's state of mind, capturing every nuance and transforming it into line, symbol, graphic, image.

The protagonist, moreover, is himself immersed in a character that moves and lives among demonstrations, protests, politicized struggles fragmented by self-referential dreamlike dimensions that are sometimes embarrassing.

There is a lot of frankness and sincerity in Pazienza's work, always ready to make us participants in his thoughts, his paranoias, and the thousand contradictions that overpower him.

In Pentothal, as we were saying, the "rules" are reduced to the bare minimum: it is a triumph of new languages, slang, onomatopoeia, nonexistent words, deliberate and often pursued misgrammar. The individual panels then, it's as if they never stay still on the page. As if they dance with the precise intent of continually misleading the reader. They are thus placed off-center, sometimes small and sometimes overwhelming us with entire pages completely covered in markings.

Pentothal has the explosive communicative force of a boy just over 20 with the fire inside him and a mad, visionary, and brilliant inner world, ready to explode at any moment.

This comic was a disruptive cultural revolution that even enchanted Umberto Eco and convinced Oreste Del Buono, then director of Linus, to publish these unpublished pages, believing first in the genius of that boy who, in the following years, would give us undisputed masterpieces like “Zanardi” and “Pompeo” (already reviewed by me).

A hallucinogenic trip before a comic.

A report of those "years of lead" written and drawn in a dreamlike and shocking form.