Reiser
Il Porcone

That damn old uncle Raiser saw it coming.

In an unsuspecting era, "the most irreverent cartoonist of French comics" (a few years after his death in 1983 and after numerous appearances in Linus) was published in Italy by a large authoritative publishing house in the field of comics. Thus appears the saga of "The Big Pig" (1986 Milano Libri Edition), the story of an over-40, worn-out, flabby, disheveled, smelly, physically horrendous man perpetually in his underwear (with the inevitable ball peeking out) who says and does all sorts of things. An anti-hero par excellence, therefore, cousin of the old Bukowski and the Great Lebowski (the rhyme is coincidental, but the second exists only in the imagination of all those who adored the homonymous film by the Coen brothers).

The Big Pig is a bomb of irreverent transgression, politically incorrect and at times annoying and maybe that's why I like him so much: he farts in the elevator just before getting off, staring straight into the eyes, with a sly look, at the people enduring the just-released farts, touches the balls of a blind man begging, pretends to hit on the old wenches of a recreation club, mocks the English guards, pees from the diving board into the public pool, attempts a sexual approach with a kangaroo at the zoo and more, in a continuous saga of incorrectness and nonsense for their own sake where sex (cheap, vulgar, and pretextual) reigns supreme.

Crude antics of a grown man mentally stuck at 7 years old

Yet, the character immediately gains the reader's sympathy. The rough, informal stroke, dashed off by the author emphasizes the immediacy and spontaneity, as if to underline stories born almost instinctively, poured directly "in their final form" without even a pencil to outline the shapes or a script to guide the lines.

Panels therefore disconnected, irregular, with unbalanced blacks and whites applied with pen and smudged liquid ink in several spots, like "brushstrokes of tar on a dark, uneven, one-way street". It's hard not to be captivated by the disenchanted and vulgar charm of a character who, in an unconscious transference with the reader, allows himself to do things that anyone (at least once in life and in an impulse of anarchic indifference), would always have dreamed of doing: against institutions, common sense, the Church, the system, and healthy civil living.

Childish? Yes.

Vulgar? Certainly.

Useless? Probably yes... But for at least half an hour, enjoy the amusing exploits of this depraved and disgusting being, without art or part, without ethics or morals, who acts and moves like a wild animal to dismantle the rules of bon ton and correctness that nestle in our civil society.

I ask for just half an hour; the time to have some healthy liberating laughs, close the book, and return to the frustrated life of bank employees, model students, desperate housewives, or internet addicts.

We will be losers as before, but at least, a bit more aware, disenchanted and... With a hint of a smile on our lips.