Comic Works
Sardelli is a longtime collaborator on the satirical magazine Il Vernacoliere and contributes through his satire of Italian mainstream culture, religion and religious kitsch. His nonsensical style resembles that of Monty Python and Daniele Luttazzi, but he has a recognizable style of his own rooted in Tuscan popular humor. Sardelli, as a comic author, constructs elaborate parodies of Padre Pio or of Italian sagra (popular festivals that Italian contadine communities once often organized); the so-called Proesie ("Proetries") that are ineffable nonsense works such as:
"Take care when
you move it from the sofa:
it's the very fragile
corpse of a dingo."
His Più Belle Cartoline Del Mondo ("Most Beautiful Postcards Of The World") are elaborate stories built around 60s and 70's kitsch postcards, often representing children or couples, written in an absurdly baroque and archaic style and lexicon. A recurring character in these stories is that of the fictional dwarf Gargilli Gargiulo.
Characters and comic-strips by Sardelli include:
Clem Momigliano: an improbable detective whose character blatantly lampoons mainstream heroic characters of adventure comics. Like Mandrake he has a coloured sidekick, Negro Balongo, which he unashamedly exploits as a slave. Most of Clem's adventures begin with a classic opener mocking adventure comics and have an improbable mission issued by a mysterious "Chief", only to collapse miserably because of some trivial impediment such as the neighbour using Clem's rocket to anchor her laundry line.
Il Bibliotecario ("The Librarian"): a peculiar comic strip made always of two-frames variations on the same theme: in the first the librarian greets an unnamed elderly woman with a flowery and archaic sentence and the woman will ask for an impossibly difficult to find ancient book, such as the "Gabinetto Armonico" of Filippo Bonanni. In the second frame the librarian will reply with totally unconnected and, more often than not, heavily offensive behaviour.
Merda ("Shit"): a mute strip where various characters are nonsensically obsessed by their relationship with excrement.
Circo ("Circus"): about the adventures of a circus whose animals indulge in embarrassing activities like homosexual copulation just when the show is to start.
Read more about this topic: Federico Maria Sardelli
Famous quotes containing the words comic and/or works:
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