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Rating: "Soon I discovered that no event is ever reported correctly by the newspapers" G. Orwell
It is always necessary to separate the facts from the works that describe them.
In this graphic novel by the young Christian Mirra titled "That Night at the Diaz" (Guanda Graphic Editions - 90 pages - €16), the author narrates in comic form his experience being present in Genoa on the sad day of July 21, 2001, during the attack by police forces at the Diaz School in Genoa. One of the most shameful and inhumane acts ever committed by the State Police of a European country. A distressing event that, as often happens in Italy, started with a tragedy and ended in farce, after the almost total acquittal of the defendants and which, indeed, became a form of personal success for the police chiefs overseeing those days, allowing them a remarkable career within the Police. All rigorously documented in the book.
Remembering this event was certainly necessary given that Italians always have short memories for such things, the only point is that the operation is only partially successful, and here’s why.
Firstly, there’s the purely graphic and comic part by the author, who is not mature in style and presents evident discontinuities with questionable and uncertain techniques (clearly inspired by Crumb and the early Moebius but just for reference), including a poor ability to represent the human figure (unfortunately he lacks the genius of an Andrea Pazienza, who could effortlessly move from a cartoon to a realistic human figure, demonstrating exceptional qualities in both cases!).
But up to there, patience... there is always room for improvement.
Secondly, the script is lacking in several areas. The peculiar fact in itself, for example, that is, the assault on the Diaz, is represented in a banal way and reduced to only 9 pages (one chapter), all viewed strictly from the author's perspective and giving little sense of the dynamics and gravity of the entire operation. The rest is the description of the beforehand events, convalescence, and waiting for the sentence, etc. In short, not much or at least the less interesting part, comic-wise.
What I fully save, instead, is the play of blurred images in certain scenes due to the breaking of glasses by the punitive raid and the moments of introspection of the author who, in the hospital, is torn between the sense of guilt and the (founded) fear of having entered a Kafkaesque mechanism from which no solution is seen.
In short, the project could have truly been something original and mature, but as it is, it feels like an operation only partially successful or... just halfway there.
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