Silver
Tu Chiamalo Beppe!

"You call him Beppe and he will answer you. But don't specify what time, don't ask him why, don't explain how. In short, don't add too much and ask him even less."

I love Lupo Alberto. For about 10 years. A (platonic) sentimental relationship determined to last forever. Indeed. Because, scrolling through Silver's monthly boards, we paradoxically see almost all the ills and defects of our beautiful country: moral backwardness, precariousness, authoritarianism, buffoonery, naive good-naturedness, mercilessness. All transferred into the contorted mind of some anthropomorphized beast à la mode italienne and thrown into an anglophone geographic context. A desperate blue wolf, a gossiping hen, two wandering moles, a big presumptuous and arrogant dog, a zany duck... fun little animals that, absolutely deprived of any human subject, run the show, or rather, a very little technological farm, far from the city context, whose archaic and almost anachronistic values are centered on work, respect for one's role, conviviality and static social mobility. The most appreciable feature of the Lupo Alberto saga is simplicity. No frills, un-concise plots, characters and stories reflecting the past and present of our society. In a few panels, the comedic charge of the characters involved skyrockets thanks to the immediacy of the dialogues and the simplicity of the contexts.

Call Him Beppe! is a "Greatest Hits" of the best boards (in black and white) and stories (in color) narrating the (mis)adventures of Alberto, Marta, Henry the Mole, his wife Cesira, the bobtail Moses. The first, unripe sketches of the blue canid and his companions in misfortune harmoniously merge with the strips of the '90s, a perfect mix of the best Italian comedy in recent decades. Hilarious are the scenes in which Alberto quickly flees from the eternal fiancée Marta, determined to marry him, the jokes with the neighbor couple La Talpa, funny little underground animals who spend more time in the sun than in the bowels of the earth, the tragicomic encounters-clashes with Moses, the guardian, a perpetually furious dog who intends to thwart the raids of the Wolf at the McKenzie Farm (initially the residences of the animals/inhabitants were nothing more than nests, dens, and henhouses). But the humor I mentioned above is not so much about the misadventures as it is about the dialogues, the single jokes contained in the speech bubbles: euphemistically and ironically addressing themes like politics, sexuality, couple relationships, economy, society. It is not uncommon for funny dialogues and frivolous panels to consciously provide the comics reader with important messages of current events, ironic metaphors, controversial and irreverent depictions of some public figures, even mini protests against the Evils of Modern and Globalized Man (in idiosyncrasy with the rurality expressed by the McKenzie Farm).

A famous example of this is the more tragic than comedic adventure of Bird, embracing a series of panels among the most loved and appreciated by fans of Silver's Wolf: the protagonist, Bird indeed, is a chick (in human terms it would be defined as "adolescent") abandoned by its mother in its nest. He is not yet able to fly and repeatedly falls from the nest (paradoxically climbing back up the trunk of the tree where his "home" rests with his little feet). The noisy attempts to take a decent flight annoy Alberto (who indeed resides in that forest). The blue wolf initially shows distrust towards the chick (the latter, on the contrary, immediately fraternizes with his neighbor affectionately calling him "old man"), and then directly takes on the role of "flight teacher" to the small bird. However, even Alberto's help seems to prove futile until the warning of the latter about the imminent opening of the hunting season provokes the physical and mental "awakening" of Bird who, after a few hops, packs his bags, bids goodbye to the Wolf, and sets off for the warm South. His journey is short-lived: Bird is shot to death by the gruff Moses (the only situation in which the bobtail causes the death of his "opponent"), who, in front of a tearful Alberto, justifies his heinous act with "Was I supposed to wait for him to massacre us all in our beds?!" The final panel, deliberately left unfinished by Silver who after five scenes notes "Sorry, the emotion prevents me from continuing," shows the blue canid, sobbing, laying the lifeless body of his friend on the nest that birthed him. This represents one of the most "sentimental" and profound peaks ever reached by a comic strip.

Returning to a more humorous context, equally amusing are the gags featuring as co-protagonist the drunkard Henry the Mole (the only secondary character to carve out a large autonomy in Silver's saga) determined to impersonate (poorly) various roles, including couples' psychologist, image consultant, astrologer; his dialogues with his friend Alberto (Beppe), descending into the most absurd grotesque, are then absolutely side-splitting. Not to mention the controversies between Henry – Cesira the Mole, an old-fashioned, stressed, frustrated little woman not very up-to-date with current trends, the baseball bats of Moses which he periodically hurls violently at the hated Wolf, of Alice, Marta's hen friend, "maneater" eternally overweight...

"Call him Beppe and he will answer you. But don't specify what time, don't ask him why, don't explain how. In short, don't add too much and ask him even less. He's a man of few words, but good ones. One who lives and lets live, one who loves company if it's not too close and love if it's not suffocating. He's Lupo Alberto, but you call him Beppe."