papernoise blackbook

The book shop Irnerio in Bologna puts Giètz! in the first place for best selling books! Feels great!

And as we are at it… here’s some photos from the presentation we made during the BilBolBul festival at the above mentioned book shop.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Italiano.

The Italian comic festival BilBolBul, held in Bologna, will host a small exhibition of original drawings from my latest comic Giètz!. to know more about it: www.bilbolbul.net

Unfortunately today is another one of those days where I can’t post anything. I hope I can catch up tomorrow.

Sorry, still none of my regular posts. But in the meantime here’s a small preview of a comic I’ve been working on lately. It’s about the fathers of goth rock Bauhaus and it will be published in the upcoming anthology Guida illustrata al frastuono più atroce #2 by the Italian punk comic group Lamette. I really like the vintage film touch I managed to give to this panels. Basically it’s the “Dog Show technique” adapted to b/w. The text is a variation on the Bauhaus hit Bela Lugosi is Dead. That’s why it all looks like some old horror movie.

As you will have noticed I haven’t been updating the blog this week. Though Gietz! is now finished, I still have a lot of stuff to do that I have kept rescheduling because of the aformentioned…

I really need a couple of weeks to get my life back into balance, then I will start to post as usual. Please don’t forget me in the meantime.

I was recently interviewed by the local newspaper Qui Bolzano. It was great fun to make up some stupid answers…

My friend Reinhold Giovanett from the Südtiroler Tageszeitung, just wrote this little article on Spiracle. It says more or less the same things you can find in this post on my blog (skip down to the “Spiracle” chapter).

Though my new years eve, between a flu and some cat allergy hasn’t been really amazing, my start into the new year has been kind of great. And It almost looks like 2010 will be the year of Music. Gietz, my latest comic (written by Andrea Campanella), which is all about Jazz, will be out round the end of February (published by Tunué), the short comic Spiracle, based on Soap&Skin’s song with the same title, has been published a week ago on the Italian music magazine il Mucchio, and my 8bit-industrial-analogue-noise-soundtrack project Rumpelfilter Heavy Industries seems to be finally rising from the dead. Well, music has always been one of my greatest passions.

Gietz

3 years ago I started to work on a comic project called Gietz. Back then things were still a bit different, I was going to university, I was working freelance doing some graphic design and illustration, living in a flat with other 6 people. I was dreaming of becoming a professional comic artist, the Monipodio group was still active, and I was attending every comicon and festival in Italy. A lot of things have changed since then, and I guess I have changed too.

Two days ago I uploaded all the 123 pages and the cover illustration I created for Gietz on the Publishers ftp. Now it’s over, I can start to live again (and I can start to post some more hundred word stories)

Gietz is a story written by Andrea Campanella (with whom I made the comic Round and Round in 2004) and is about a young Italian trumpet player, who raises to fame during the fifties. The story reminds a lot of Italian movies of that period, there’s the love for the simple, yet strong woman from the countryside. The refined but spoiled woman from the big city. There’s the poverty of the after-war turning into the economic wonder of the succeeding years. And there’s, of course, a lot of Jazz music from that time, ranging from the well known, American musicians like Duke Ellington, Chet Baker, Harry James to less known Italian ones like Piero Umiliani and Alberto Depasquale. By the way, nobody nowadays knows who Piero Umilianiwas, but everybody knows one song he wrote: Mah Nà Mah Nà (which became famous thanks to Jim Hanson and his Muppet Show), it’s great to rediscover people like him. More about it here on wikipedia.org.

More about Gietz in my upcoming weekly Jazz Friday series.

http://www.tunue.com/
http://blog.komix.it/gietz/

Spiracle

Spiracle is a wonderful song by Austrian songwriter Anja Plaschg aka Soap&Skin, contained in her first (and still only) album Lovetune for Vacuum. Andrea Provinciali, one of the editors of Il Mucchio, asked me several months ago to participate in this project called Pencil Song, where comic artists are asked to reinterpret a song of their choice in comic form. It was around that time that I discovered Soap&Skin and her sound just made me want to draw something to it.
As a funny side note, the issue in which this comic appears, is fittingly numbered #666.

When I was a child
I toyed with dirt and I fought
As a child
I killed the slugs, I bored with a bough
In their spiracle

(Lyrics from the song Spiracle)

Spiracle comic on Deviantart
http://www.ilmucchio.it/
http://www.soapandskin.com/

Rumpelfilter Heavy Industries

I always had this passion for electronic music. Ever since I got my first Casiotone keyboard and used the stereo mic inputs of my cassette recorder to do some multitrack recordings… My gear has been dusting in a dark corner of the basement for years, because work and university just wouldn’t let me find the time to do something with it. But now that Gietz is finally done, and I need a bit of a break from comics, this is the perfect time to spin up the oscillators and make some noise!

The latest addition to my acoustic weaponry is the amazing MSSIAH cartridge, designed to turn your Commodore64 into a full-fledged SID powered synthesizer! This is all so exiting! The first project on the list, is a soundtrack for the super8 sci-fi trash movie Killer Aloe from Outer Space by Daniel Mahlknecht and Silvana Zancolò.

http://virb.com/rumpelfilter
http://www.8bitventures.com/mssiah/
http://www.myspace.com/analogewiderstandsfront

I decided to move the posting day for my A Hundred Word Stories project from Wednesday to Thursday. See you the day after tomorrow with some new stories!