Fulvio Risuleo’s and Antonio Pronostico’s appearance on the Italian graphic novel scene was quite sudden and unexpected. I consider myself quite an attentive person and I try to stay aware of what happens to comics in my country, but this… I didn’t see this coming. I never would have have predicted how relevant the two authors would quickly become. We’re not talking about a long grind in the underground, a slow build in self-publishing notoriety through social media exposure before eventually landing that big breakthrough hit in the industry. Risuleo and Pronostico just kind of… happened. Of course, they both had prior experiences - Fulvio as a movie director and Antonio as a graphic designer. They published their first graphic novel together in 2019 with Coconino Press, probably Italy’s most influential graphic novel and authorial comics publisher. This is to say: they debuted in the big leagues. That book, titled Sniff, was per se sufficient to set expectations very high for the artistic future of the duo. Those expectations wouldn’t go unfulfilled.
* * *
A preamble: Even though this piece is meant to be centered on the work of Pronostico and Risuleo together, as if they are an inseparable entity, I think it’s convenient (and easier for me) to use Fulvio Risuleo as an individual pivot point to start the whole thing. I don’t mean this to downplay Pronostico’s role, but I find Fulvio’s solo excursions into comics useful to widen the picture. This will involve some digressions. I love digressions, sorry: I’ll try to keep them short.
So let’s begin by exposing a lie. I just told you that Risuleo’s and Pronostico’s appearance was quite sudden. This is not quite true. A year before the publication of Sniff, Fulvio alone authored a small, strange book titled L’idra indecisa (001 Edizioni, 2018): “The Undecided Hydra.” I remember buying it but not giving it much attention, probably because the publisher was a weird and erratic one. It's rare you a publishing house with an amazing but schizophrenic catalogue, titles spanning masterpieces of the historietas — until recently, 001 was the Italian publisher of Oesterheld’s and Solano López’s The Eternaut— to more contemporary and avant-garde books such as Conor Stechschulte’s The Amateurs. And everything in between: French-Belgian classic sci-fi comics; some Italian graphic novels; Eddie Campbell’s Alec; a growing manga collection that included both Osamu Tezuka and Shintarō Kago, as well as some kind of hentai-like Euromanga series titled Gotho Namite. In that exciting mess of a catalogue, L’idra indecisa was definitely not the most eye-catching book, with its scribble-like appearance and its intellectual divertissement vibe. But had I read it right there and then, I would have had a tantalizing bite of the most interesting aspects of Risuleo’s writing.
L’idra indecisa is about a hydra trying to decide where to go for dinner. Home or restaurant? What kind of cuisine? What restaurant? The hydra argues with itself, and every time a new decisional crossroad opens up a new head grows to share its opinion. Very quickly the situation gets out of hand with a proliferation of heads that bite each other off - but every time one head falls, two new ones take its place. It must be hard being a hydra, especially an indecisive one.
Risuleo is not a “good” draftsman in the traditional sense. His childlike and geometrical sketches of the self-arguing hydra don’t reveal any technical mastery. What they do reveal, however, is a deep understanding of rhythm - of both narrative and emotional functionality. Bluntly put: a deep understanding of what is good comic storytelling. At the same time, L’idra indecisa is a game, a joke. This is not to say it has no deeper meaning, but its raison d'être seems to be in following its strong and futile back cover pitch: “a hydra can’t decide what to eat, let’s see where this leads us.” Risuleo loves to play with strange ideas, and knows how to take them seriously enough to make them flourish, but he is not so serious as to become arrogant or condescending.
* * *
Back to 2019. Coconino publishes Sniff. I read it right away and I was very happy to be tasked with speaking to the authors at a book presentation. This Fulvio’s first 'big' work in comics, and his first book in tandem with Antonio Pronostico and his oily pencils. The visual impact of Sniff is stunning from the beginning, and Pronostico’s style would evolve with each subsequent book. Pronostico cites the works of Lorenzo Mattotti and Italian illustrator Ferenc Pintér as a major influence: without outlines, the dramatic impact of each panel relies entirely on his wise use of the color palette and its contrasts.
To prepare myself for the event, I finally read L’idea indecisa and watched two of Risuleo’s early movies, which confirmed to me the aforementioned qualities of the director/writer: his ability to understand the function of the medium he’s using, especially through wonderfully laid out dialogues, and his playfulness with weird ideas explored with taste and equilibrium.
At first glance, Sniff seems like the very opposite: a poorly written story about a couple breaking up. The book opens with a couple departing on a skiing holiday. Their relationship seems near the point of no return; the tension between the two screams “irreconcilable differences.” They also sound somewhat detached from what’s happening, as if they’re commenting on each other's actions more than they’re talking to each other - as if the couple is a separate entity and not the sum of the two individuals. "You’ll see that things will change," she says. "They won’t," he replies.
"It’s always like this," he adds.
"This time is different. Why are you such a pessimist?"
"I’m no pessimist," he says. "I just observe and evaluate."
Just a couple of pages later, the two characters are speaking in the third person. They are in a hotel room, he’s laying in bed, and she appears to being describing what he will do. "Now he’ll get closer and kiss her. She’ll try to resist…" Disconsolate, he comments, "I think it’s over," but she continues, still in the third person, "she’ll try to resist a bit, but in the end she will lean in. They’ll kiss. They’ll get naked. And later, they’ll go skiing together."
I remember encountering this for the first time and distinctly thinking, “What the hell am I reading?” And then asking myself how something like this could be published without revision, refining. I thought the characters talking this way was meant to signal that they had lost all agency in the midst of their in-fact-already-ended relationship, as if they were observers of something beyond their control. But if the dialogue was some sort of meta-commentary on the inevitability of a breakup, it was too goofy to be substantial and not goofy enough to be funny.
Then, the twist. Sniff is not the story of a couple breaking up. It’s a story about… noses. The noses on the faces of the man and woman love each other, but they’re attached to the bodies of a couple that is breaking up, forcing them to separate too. The scenario is indeed one about an unwanted breakup, but the speakers are not the couple breaking up, pressed into some obscure and ill-considered linguistic game. The dialogue is that of the most regretful parts of their bodies, describing and commenting on the actions of the couple - victims of the actions of people over which they have no control. Brilliant.
The point of the story, when the reader realizes what is truly going on, may vary depending on their attention to detail – but when one understands that the protagonists are the noses, a lot of things start to become crystal clear in their refinement. Word balloons, for example, never issue from the mouths of the couple, because they are not the ones speaking, but the art is often positioned so there is only a subtle detachment to these lamentations. Makes sense.
A small detail, but one that Risuleo and Pronostico insist on, knowing exactly how much to take themselves and their concept seriously. Such finer points morph what could easily have been a sterile game into a book more than worth reading. A book capable of strong emotional response and, for those interested in getting new people into comics, very suitable to teach the peculiarities of comic language. Besides all that, Sniff contains one of the most elegant sex scenes I’ve seen in comics in a long time - and yes, it’s a scene where the noses have intercourse.
The fact that Pronostico pulled this off was by itself reason enough to trust this collaboration going forward, and I’m happy to say this trust was not betrayed whatsoever.
* * *
In early 2021, it was announced that the pair were working on a new book titled Tango. It was published again by Coconino, in the spring of that year. This time I wasn’t walking into it blindly, and my expectations were pretty high. In the time since Sniff, Pronostico’s popularity grew alongside his stunning capabilities as an illustrator, and we all started seeing more and more of his work on book covers, event posters and the pages of magazines. Each illustration was better than the last. I also became more familiar with Risuleo’s manner of writing, his playfulness a harbinger of unassuming depth, alongside his inventiveness and abilities as a dialogist. I re-watched his 2017 debut feature film, Guarda in alto (“Look Up”), falling deeper in love with the atmosphere of its journey into a parallel reality through the cracks of Rome, through the dreamlike solitude of its protagonist. I also read again Sniff and L’idra indecisa, trying to figure out what sort of game was waiting for me in Tango. Little did I know, it would literally be a game.
In a way, Tango is also a book about a couple breaking up. More than breaking up - to be precise, it’s a book about a couple constantly fighting, set up as a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure book, with each sequence ending on a choice the reader must make to proceed with the story. In the first scene we meet the couple and a real estate agent trying to sell them a house. It’s a nice house, perfect for a nice young couple like them. "But also perfect for a couple with a little one!" the agent adds. "What does he mean by 'little one'?", the couple asks themselves. Or rather, the couple asks the reader: a puppy or a kid?
If we think he meant a puppy, we go to page 7. If we feel he meant a kid, we go to page 9.
For the first half of the book, two things are clear: after every scene we’re meant to choose what situation the young couple will meet; and, regardless of our choice, they’ll end up fighting. If the "little one" is a puppy, she will be scared of dying during an unexpected pregnancy due to his inattentiveness, against which he tries to defend himself. If the "little one" is a child, he will become angry at her mother's interference in how to raise the child, while she threatens to leave at the first violent outburst.
It's meaningful futility: a sequence of choices that betrays no substantial change, like reading about that pair of friends we all have that we can’t help but thinking are not meant to be together. They try, they hold on, but from the outside it’s crystal clear it doesn’t work. It’ll never work. They just keep fighting. It’s sad and frustrating, and the reader constantly goes back and forth trying to figure out if, by taking another branch, things will end up differently. They won’t.
Pronostico has said that the idea of the book came from an actual fight he had with his girlfriend. “One of those fights,” I’m paraphrasing, “that goes on and on like in a downward spiral until, at some point, you’re just fighting. There’s no why anymore, and if there is one it doesn’t really matter. The fight is sort of alive and has taken control.” It was Risuleo who came up with the idea of giving the reader some form of agency on the story. Julio Cortázar is cited in the back cover as the primary inspiration for Tango, which I found very funny. Risuleo does too. When asked about it during a book presentation, he said: "Rayuela, by Julio Cortázar, has been a great inspiration for Tango. Or at least it could have been. I never actually finished it." If you heard its tone and saw his face as he said this, you’d understand the great laugh it raised in the audience.
Pronostico was allegedly very, very opposed to the idea of a laying out the story as a type of game book, but I’m happy Risuleo insisted. I think this book works for several reasons, but one of them is definitely the tree-like structure of its first half. More on this in a moment.
In Tango we find the many virtues of Risuleo’s writing: precise dialogue; the intelligence of some narrative turns (with one in particular that struck me as a nod to Mazzucchelli’s stunning Asterios Polyp); the tightness of the choices offered to the reader, but also the pace at which they’re offered, neither too often nor too infrequently. Pronostico, on his side of things, abandons for this first half the placid oily pencils for which he was and remains known in favor of a clean black & white style that’s sometimes expressionistic and other times just politely oppressive. This brings to mind the shift made by Manuele Fior, another great Italian cartoonist, between two of his most influential books: Cinquemila chilometri al secondo (Coconino Press, 2010; in English from Fantagraphics as 5,000 km Per Second, 2016) and L’intervista (Coconino Press, 2013; in English from Fantagraphics as The Interview, 2017). Or Gipi, who in La terra dei figli (Coconino Press, 2016; in English from Fantagraphics as Land of the Sons, 2018) abandoned the sweet and beloved watercolors of Unastoria (Coconino Press, 2013; in English from Fantagraphics as One Story, 2020). I feel somebody should, at some point, look into the cartoonists that subvert the aesthetic expectations of their readership. Anyway.
Tango’s first half ends with a map of all the possible choices one could have taken up to that point. It’s useful if the reader wants to backtrack and make sure they didn’t miss any branch of this tree in which every branch has a fruit and every fruit is a fight. It’s also useful because it makes it clear that, despite the choices you have made, there has only ever been one destination. The second half of the book is fully linear and, for the most part, is a collection of one-page snapshots of–you guessed it–the couple fighting. So, one question comes to mind: were we really interacting with those characters and their story in any meaningful way?
As Sniff was a game of perception, Tango is a game of structure. It’s hard for me not to read the fake agency it gives the reader in the first half, before making every branch converge to a single point and then taking the reader's agency away, as a statement: fighting, or at least this kind of fighting, is something over which you have no control. When it starts, it’s already too late. At the beginning you think you can change the course of things, and you can try, but you’re already into a funnel that has one one exit. I don’t think the book would have been one-tenth as effective if it was laid out in linear terms from the beginning: again, the game at its base is the root of its meaning. And its meaning is one of inevitability and of denied or unsalvageable love.
* * *
Between Tango and their most recent book together, I encountered two other comics by Fulvio Risuleo that I think are worth at least mentioning. The first one is a reprint of an older work, similar in structure to L’idra indecisa. Its original title was simply Pixel, now updated to I pixel sognano in 8k? (Ultra, 2016; reprinted by pièdimosca, 2022). Translated, the title asks, “Does Pixel Dream in 8k?” It’s the story of two pixel-made animals trying to organize a picnic with their friends. They need to hold the picnic in order to discern whom among their friends can be their leader and guide all of them towards immortality. But organizing things is hard. Managing relationships is harder, especially if your made of pixels and, every once in a while, you decompose and have to work to re-assemble yourself. On pièdimosca's website the publisher states that this small book is about "how complex it is to go from 'saying' to 'doing.'" It definitely is, but it’s also a book about how hard is to conciliate what makes ourselves with everybody else. About how hard it is to cultivate meaningful relationships without losing ourselves in the pursuit of companionship, and without forcing our dreams on others. It’s a genuinely funny book - and more than funny, it’s quietly sad.
The other Risuleo comic is called NapoliTopor. I’m not impartial on this one, having published it myself in 2023 with add editore, with whom I currently work. I still think it’s worth spending a couple of words on the book. Fulvio approached me during a book fair in Turin to pitch me the idea. It went something like this: “I have this idea for a book about Roland Topor, the great French artist. My father Tonino and I love him, it’s one thing that connects us, but nobody knows his stunning work. So we wanted to do a story to explore his art. Not a biography, more of an homage.” I’m not really keen on biographies in comics form, so that caught me attention. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Well, for starters, the story is set in Naples. And the protagonists are a father and a son tracing the passage of Topor in the city. They’re looking for the costumes of Le Grande Macabre, his only staging of an opera. Of course, Topor did that in Bologna, but he hated Bologna. He loved Naples, though! So we feel setting the story there would best captures his spirit. And then, Topor is depicted as the Chimera. Because, you know, he was a chimeric artist. And we meet him…”
I will spare you more details of that wonderful chat, full of anecdotes about an artist who at the time I barely knew, full of stories of a young Fulvio discovering Topor’s art and connecting with his dad through it. One piece at a time, the book came together and proved to be bigger, much bigger than the sum of its parts. It’s an homage to Topor, yes. An investigation into his art and what made him great. A reflection on art in general, even. It’s also a purely fictional story that deviates from historical accuracy in favor of a more “spiritual” portrait of the artist and his relationship with his son Nicolas. It’s also a partly autobiographical work, since the father and son of the book are in a way alter egos of Tonino and Fulvio Risuleo. And in being so, it’s also a meta-narrative exploration of the relationship between a father and a son united by a great passion, in a book that credits them both as author: son Fulvio, who’s already an author; and father Tonino, who achieves his goal of drawing a comic book after years of working in television commercials.
I loved working with Fulvio and Tonino on NapoliTopor, and I’m proud I contributed to its existence. I love that it’s a complex book that talks about lots of things; I love that it’s a somewhat rare example in contemporary narrative of a father-son relationship that’s not toxic. The father here isn’t absent, nor is he violent. He’s not the origin of inescapable trauma. He’s … what a father should be?
* * *
NapoliTopor helped me realize something I'd missed in Fulvio Risuleo’s previous work, especially the collaborations with Antonio Pronostico. One day I was walking with Risuleo through the streets of a neighborhood in Rome called Villini del Pigneto, where Risuleo and Pronostico have their studio. Risuleo was telling me about L’eletto (“The Chosen One”), their upcoming collaboration. I asked him if this was going to be another book about a couple fighting through a bad relationship. He quickly said, "No." Then he added, "Well, in a way. It definitely is a book about relationships." Thinking about this, about his other books and about NapoliTopor (which we were still finalizing at that time), I realized that maybe I'd missed the point. These books weren't about breaking up, or about impossible relationships between noses. Maybe, in a more general sense, they were just about relationships. Then L’eletto came out and it was another shock.
Published by Coconino in 2023, L’eletto presents itself, once again, as a formal game of sorts. It’s a short book, 112 pages, made even shorter by its structure: every drawn sequence is followed by a transcription of the sequence itself (that is to say, its dialogue), written in the protagonist’s great calligraphy. But it’s not really a one-to-one copy of the spoken and interior lines. The writings have scribbles on them, notes, little drawings, as if somebody was writing down from memory something that had happened in the past: trying to remembering things correctly, adjusting words, figuring out how to preserve the specific feel of a specific interaction by adding visual clues to contextualize what words alone can’t. In this sense, it might seem that we’re seeing in the comic pages what actually happened, and then reading it from the protagonist’s memories. The mismatch between words might then be a correction, or an afterthought. But it may as well be the other way around: someone remembering (or imagining) something and putting it into a diary, which will then be translated into comics form.
Either way, the constant give-and-take between two forms of the same sequence is what drives the reader, and it’s quite interesting (both from a narrative and linguistic point of view) what captures the attention in the two cases: when we read in comics and when we focus on in words. Also, either way, the calligraphic aspect of the written sequences is relevant. The protagonist starts out as a poet, trying to sell his compositions in a self-publishing fair. He’s noticed by some businessmen, who buy his work not for its poetic value but for the excellence of the penmanship. This alone could be read as a cruel but poignant meta-commentary on how things go in comic book festivals, with aspiring artists being acclaimed for all the wrong things.
Anyway, after meeting the businessmen, our guy – who looks a lot like Antonio Pronostico himself – gets a job in their graphic design firm. He has a hard time connecting to the people around him, as he recalls both in the comics and in their rewriting. Everyone seems to be part of some group he knows nothing about, until one day he is again notices, this time by the guru-like chief of the whole thing who praises his work in calligraphy, and for whatever inscrutable reason bestows on him the title of “chosen one.”
After that, everything changes. Everyone becomes gentle, accommodating, obliging – servile, even. Our man is offered coffee, meals, favors, sex. He becomes a star in this strange bubble of a world, and he’s introduced to its rules, its rituals, its secret gestures.
This is all loosely based on Pronostico's real-life experiences with a real organization – hence, I feel, the physical resemblance between Antonio and the protagonist. I don’t know enough about the true story to go into further details, but apparently these guys are still around and are said to include some quite powerful and influential figures, possibly linked to dramatic and violent events of the recent past. I find stunning that L’eletto has its roots in reality (what a shock to discover that!), but I think it’s better to read it as a pure fictional thing and then, if really needed, to investigate its connection to real-life events: not as an origin point for this paranoid and noirish story, but as a superstructure for optional contextualization.
When L’eletto was about to come out, I was told by a friend working at Coconino that it was Risuleo’s and Pronostico’s best work so far. "A huge step up when compared to their previous books." I thought it hard to believe. How could two young yet stunningly talented artists surpass themselves so much in such a short time?
I have to say that, despite a persisting personal preference for Tango, my friend was right. L’eletto is an incredible book. I don’t get this excited so much anymore; a side effect of reading probably too much. When it happens, though, I am speechless. Risuleo tightens his scope even more, the linguistical game here even more profound and meaningful than it was in Sniff and Tango, forcing the reader to reflect on the reading process as the reading goes on. This book, though its explicit toying with visual and textual comparisons, is a meta-essay on the act of reading comics: I’ll definitely use it to teach going forward.
Pronostico, meanwhile, is in a state of grace. Never before has he achieved such power with his pencils, framing, use of colors. The palette is stunning, more complex than before, and the artist continuously adapts his gaze to set and follow the evolving feelings of the story, going from “everyday slice of life” to “noir” as the sequence of events spirals towards a dramatic finale. The overall visual kick is almost unbelievable. At one point I joked that Pronostico was “Mattotti but younger and better.” That may not have been entirely a joke after all. He seems to paint more than draw with his pencils, and the shades and gradients he achieves are almost unbelievable.
But most of all, L’eletto made me realize what Risuleo meant earlier by saying that the book was “in a way” a book about breakups and “definitely” a book about relationships. It’s possible that all of Risuleo’s books (the ones with Pronostico and the ones by himself or with his father) are about a desire for connectedness, a struggle towards meaningful relationships that is not lessened by how bad those relations end up being. It doesn’t matter if the story reads like a divertissement or a drama. It doesn’t matter if it’s about a hydra who can’t agree with herself on what and where to eat; if it’s about two noses in love that foresee their inevitable separation; if it’s about a couple that tries to hold together despite the constant fighting; about a guy trapped in a sect that builds powerful yet obscure connections; about pixels wanting immortality, or maybe just to have some friends; about a father and a son connecting through a shared passion. Everything seems pointing not towards the impossibility or the futility of relationships, but towards their inherent relevance. Their unambiguous importance.
And, despite Risuleo and Pronostico being just at the start of their journey, I find this exploration — or this possible key to tentatively interpretation — so very endearing.
The post Fulvio Risuleo & Antonio Pronostico: A Game of Connections appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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