Gipi
Hanno ritrovato la macchina

THE REVIEW

Gipi is one of the most brilliant Italian comic book authors in the current national and international landscape, especially after the success of the autobiographical LMVDM (La mia vita disegnata male). The comic “Hanno ritrovato la macchina,” immersed in a bluish gray, as livid as the story it tells, is from 2006, but the talent of the Pisan artist is already very evident.

It is not an apparently autobiographical text, but rather a story from which a meticulous attention towards what we could define as the “last” of society emerges. We will see throughout the story how this attention becomes solidarity towards those who, with every possible effort, have tried to rebuild a life, from the unimportant person they once were.

With a phone ringing in the middle of the night, informing the protagonist of an event that should not have happened, namely the finding of the car, a journey backwards in time begins, involving a meeting after seven years of two profoundly different people, although united by a passage of deviance.

Years have worked in favor of the man woken up suddenly, now married and almost incredulous that he can see things that no longer belong to his way of thinking and acting. The same cannot be said for the other, the bad man, the tempting demon, moreover cowardly because he forces the good man to perform an action that plunges him into a severe crisis of conscience.

Of course, Gipi does not talk about religion in a serious manner, the tone is rather ironic and sharp as it is evident from the sentence that sums up all the cynicism of the bad man: “...assuming hell really exists, there’s a ninety percent chance it’s still under construction.” It is right after this exclamation that the companion falls into the terror of having contributed with his gesture to laying several bricks. And it is after this sentence that we are convinced that a comic is truly great because whoever draws it is above all a poet, in Gipi's case of human miseries.

“Hanno ritrovato la macchina” is a story that should not be revealed because it unfolds as a mystery story and as such has a surprise ending. Suffice to say that at the end of the story, the wife of the good man enters the scene, an excellent opportunity for the bad man to further fuel his guilt. But the woman’s love will be stronger and will prevent the clock hands of life from returning to a past now buried.