Andrea Pazienza
Pompeo

An unfillable void of humanity.

"Pompeo is the ideological and stylistic sum of an author (Paz) with no more ideologies and not even a style anymore" The P.

When Pompeo appeared, it was an open wound in each of our souls. A declaration of existential defeat and an unconditional surrender without mincing words. Pompeo was born as an open diary, fragile, helpless, defenseless, and disarming during the darkest period of Andrea Pazienza, the already cult artist, a true comic icon (almost a Rock Star) of the '80s.
It really pisses you off to know that everything written and drawn in this volume was already the macabre omen of a foreseen prophecy of death.

The book (released in 1987) is the faithful account of Pompeo, who is actually the not-too-disguised alter ego of the author, who finds himself confronting his failed past, his present as a drug addict now in total withdrawal, and an uncertain future that he will never see unfold (as it will be with Pazienza, who will die of an overdose in June 1988).
An album in many ways unsettling and obsessive, in black and white, drawn desperately, with an unparalleled expressive urgency (on improvised sheets, on school-grid cardboard, or pieces of paper napkins from some bar) and that confronts head-on the introspective anxieties of the author, trapped in an infernal circle he struggles to shake off. Torn between a reality too hard to accept (the continuous chase for a dose that is never enough) and the anguish of not being able to see "beyond" his sad existential condition.

The book seemingly lacks a linear script (much like Life itself) in which reality and fiction, story and tale, thoughts and actions, tears and laughter intermingle in a stylistic and reading superimposition that continually blurs the boundaries.
And it still pisses you off, the raw truth of phrases carved like epitaphs between pages scratched by nearly empty markers. Shouted phrases that scream out in agony the desire for redemption that will never come. A redemption that will only occur with the Beloved Liberation of a death announced from the beginning of the book, which will free the author from that existential burden too heavy for his fragile shoulders.

And forgive me if I insist, but it pisses me off doubly how these pages of bitter memory are still tremendously current today, 20 years after his death. As if the anxieties of then have merely changed costumes and as if that subtle cancer that is the "mal du vivre" that resides among the youth of any generation and with pronounced sensitivity, is fundamentally the same, unchanged, and ruthless decadent nihilism passed down from generation to generation.

Pazienza writes in the concluding note of the book: "In these years I’ve discovered that I am not a genius. Because yes, I confess, as a boy I hoped I was. But no, I'm just an ordinary fool. However, there's always a however, it's true, I am an eclectic draftsman. A lazy eclectic draftsman. Then I discovered that I am not reliable, and that I am not many other things, sometimes serious deficiencies for which I ask someone to forgive me."

Whatever happened: thank you nonetheless "old Paz" ...it may all have been in vain but your departure has still left an unfillable void of humanity in all of us who have identified with the torments and ecstasies of that strange "PomPaz" that you left us as heritage.