The Labyrinth

"Buzzelli has been called ‘the patron saint of all Italian cartoonists.’ A painter’s son, classically trained, he debuted at nineteen with newspaper caricatures. He moved into comics and cover illustrations— Zorro , Flash Gordon , The Phantom , Alex l’eroe dello spazio —even a regular strip, Angélique , in the Daily Mirror during a spell in London. His first graphic novel, a fantastical black-and-white satire of class revolt, hit a post-war, 1966 Italy where comics were very much for kids and there was no creator-driven graphic novel work. Buzzelli’s book was critically lauded in Italy—even by Umberto Eco !—but with a 200-copy print run, dead in the water. Then cartoonist Georges Wolinski, a Charlie Hebdo mainstay (and victim of the 2015 shootings), spotted it at a Neapolitan newsstand and was blown away. His decision to serialize it led to classic status. Buzzelli had a career in France: prizes, collaborations, more magazines. “The Franco-Belgian scene, central to Europe, is usually considered one of the world’s three major comics cultures…in broadening my remit to ‘European,’ I’ve tried to get out from under this 800-pound gorilla” The Labyrinth is paired with Zil Zelub in this first volume of his collected works. The first concerns a literal everyman (‘ uomo medio’ ) right after an unspecified apocalypse—talk about in medias res ! I defy anyone to look at the largely wordless first five pages and not think, ‘This is a comics master.’ The action ranges from mad scientists experimenting with new human-animal hybrids to an ethereal upper world ruled by rationality, whose inhabitants’ perfect bodies are assembled with parts taken from those left outside its walls. In Zil Zelub (an anagram of the artist’s own surname), the eponymous protagonist’s limbs have come off and taken on lives of their own. Dubbed ‘the Michelangelo of monsters’ and ‘the Goya of comics’ for his deft grotesquerie, Buzzelli purées influences high and low into an appealingly contemporary brew of politics, absurdism, and body horror. There’s a line from Buzzelli that his translator Jamie Richards includes in the afterword: “Comics is theater in paper and ink made for pockets and libraries, where the actors stand motionless, waiting for someone to turn the pages and bring them to life.” This is lovely. Posture must convey so much in the static panel; media scholar Henry Jenkins has traced comics’ use of them to vaudeville’s exaggerated poses. Buzzelli, with his alarming command of anatomy, greatly expands our vocabulary of gestural expression, and his words speak as well to the kind of participatory, imaginative readership that comics ask of us. That’s right. From Floating World, a store that’s a staple of the Portland comics scene. They’ve got a bright space in an older mall slowly reinventing itself; they believe in comics as art, and their offerings reflect that: zines, indies, an extensive international section. And this very handpicked curation is what they’re carrying over to the press they’ve started."