Warming by a comic for the good of the planet

by Annalisa Audino

It is a mixture of music, ecology, art, sketch and literature the eighth appointment with the annual anthology of the Italian independent comic strip curated by Claudio Calia and Emiliano Rabuiti within the project Sherwood Comix, comics section of the Sherwood Festival, the greatest musical event in Veneto organized by the Italian free radio, Radio Sherwood.

The 2010 edition of the anthology, in comparison with the past years, has enriched from the environmental theme: in some cases it constitutes the pivot of the histories, in others it’s the beginning for an ample discourse. In general, after the summit in Copenhagen, concluded with a disappointing hole in the water, and because of the numerous tensions that characterize the world, it prevails with a pessimistic vision, between the distressing one and the sarcastic one, of the relationships between man and environment.

A common point is surely the wish of the authors to overheat tempers and to communicate to all what they think, but above all what is happening. The text in fact talks about economic crisis, wars, paranoia’s, racism and violence: all elements of a heating of the global tension on the surface of the planet on which the authors of this volume have wanted to express with their histories and their sketches in a comic strip contribution.

The unpublished authors are 28 and from the cover of the volume, created by Joseph Palumbo, the message is clear: it is necessary to get angry and to get overheated about the Earth to be able to do something. The subject on the front page in fact, in the headline, has the terrestrial globe in flames, both for the anger caused by certain information and for the real global overheating. The outlines of the continents, contrasts of white color and dark ones, suggest the image of a world consumed inside itself same and blocked eyes of the subject instead they don't do anything else than to express the anguish of the powerless.

It is impossible to describe every single comic strip and the message that it brings. The histories are various for subject and thematics, over that for used artistic technique: they pass from the perspective of single characters as the laborer of Rosano described by the ink of Cristina Spanò, to the adventurous stories on the today life as the character of Sarah Bartoletti, author of Mirabilis Japala, that as a new character of Giono, fights the urban degrade grafting infesting seeds of plants, or the "sold researcher" of Kyoto Hotel (Tones Bruno) that in the name of money he tells nuclear energy as a progress and a clean energy. There are also thematics, such as the omofobia, the interceptions, the water's privatization, the black tide of the British Petroleum, the summit in Copenaghen, reported with irony in Climattivista of Zerocalcare, or the drug and the impact of this on the environment.

That is to say that the book has to be read, both for those who love comic strips and for those who want to be abducted in a book that contains passion and energy themes that are actually important, proposing them in instantly honest and sincere testimonies of the reality and avoiding the error to use the printed paper as an empty occasion to promote their own points of view without proposing concrete actions.