![\"\"](\"https:\/\/assets.fondazionepirelli.org\/rivista-pirelli\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/11132358\/RP_1967_5_Meditazioni-su-di-un-baloon_001.jpg\")
<\/p>\nI grow old… I grow old… I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled…<\/p>\n
I\u2019m getting so old… I can remember certain periods in Italian history that the youngest among us would find incomprehensible.<\/p>\n
For example, there was a time (long before the Sixties) when we\u2019d meet up for a beer somewhere or other and suddenly someone would mention Flash Gordon. At that point some members of the group (but only a few, only those who knew one another by sight) would look up, and one of them would throw down the gauntlet and say: \u201cWhat was the name of the King of the Hawkmen?\u201d. A momentary hesitation, but then the group of the elect would respond in chorus: \u201cVultan!\u201d. The answer was correct (just think, in those days not even tv quizmaster Mike Bongiorno had arrived and, come to think of it, one of the group who played these games was Romolo Siena, the future director of Bongiorno\u2019s popular \u201cLascia o raddoppia?\u201d quiz show). We all loved comics. We all worked mostly on memory and few of us had collections at home. And those who did wouldn\u2019t show them to the others. Or didn\u2019t even know they had them until they came across them later in the attic. Around 1956 (or 1957) \u2013 I was working in cultural television programmes \u2013 I organized a show called \u201cQui comincia la storiella\u201d, conceived by Vezio Melegari and directed by Pier Paolo Ruggerini. It was a review of the characters featured in the first comics, the ones brought to Italy by the \u201cCorriere dei Piccoli\u201d. I checked out the numbers from the various years in the Braidense Library (they had issues of \u201cTopolino\u201d, too) and I remember it was a real thrill to discover the existence of collectors. \u201cThere\u2019s a certain signor Ferraro from Padua who has all the issues of \u2018Jumbo\u2019!\u201d How? How did he do that?<\/p>\n
Today collectors meet at the comics festival in Lucca, or pay for a classified ad in \u201cLinus\u201d. A collection of one year\u2019s issues costs an arm and a leg, and speculators have moved in. I\u2019m getting old, getting old…<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat Miss Peach?<\/p>\n
It was 1962. At a philosophy conference held at the University of Rome I spoke about the temporal structure of Superman comics. Participants included (the conference was on \u201cdemythologization\u201d) French phenomenologists, German Dominicans and Dutch protestant theologians. They gazed at me wide-eyed with astonishment. The Dominicans and the Protestant theologians slyly purloined various items from my collection of albums, which I had brought along as documents, hiding them in the loose sleeves of their cassocks or in hardbacked ministerial folders.<\/p>\n
When I published some semantic studies on comics in Apocalypse Postponed<\/em>, the most supercilious critics stated that such frivolous arguments should not be tackled with cultural instruments commonly reserved for Kant. As if to say that the purpose of chemistry is to study perfumes but not dung, for which swearwords suffice. The first scholars of the phenomenon met almost clandestinely. Those who had discussed it even before then were thought of as bizarre journalists. Now, rightly, various university theses on comics have appeared, conferences are held, communications are discussed and I can no longer follow the literature on the subject. Sometimes I wish I could read a comic in peace without any problems. The boom of awareness has leapt over me in a single bound and I feel like a prehistoric relic.<\/p>\n In the room the women come and go talking of Charlie Brown…<\/p>\n \u201cLinus\u201d has made a breakthrough. Comics have become a national phenomenon, and a highbrow one at that. Make no mistake about it, \u201cLinus\u201d has done a meritorious job, it has taken an intellectual product of our times that we had been accustomed to think of as a mere by-product and saved it from a situation in which it was held to be of minor importance. But intellectual discovery has generated (and this is the fatal corollary to all cultural diffusion) a form of mass snobbery. We emerge from the catacombs with eyes still unaccustomed to the sunlight and those who until yesterday were sacrificing to pagan gods yell in our face: \u201cHey, why aren\u2019t you going to church?\u201d.<\/p>\n With the boom in critical awareness and the boom in the spread of the product, came a boom in fans.<\/p>\n Collectors two, academics nil. Conferences on comics are becoming mixed affairs in which psychiatrists who analyse effects and sociologists who make content analyses of the personalities of the characters alternate (without too many distinctions) with those wishing to speculate on rare issues. It won\u2019t be long before the introductory remarks on the \u201cEffects of caricature on the perception of physiognomy\u201d will be made by Yosemite Sam. Once the battle has been won, perhaps it will be necessary to proceed to purges. Every revolution must devour its most incautious offspring. But sadly, by doing so it becomes institutionalized: from the committee of public safety you move on to the First Empire. I\u2019m not exactly sure what would be the best thing to do. I\u2019m getting old.<\/p>\n And should I then presume? And how should I begin?<\/p>\n How can we not be grateful to the publishers who have tackled the problem of antiques for the masses? This brings us to reprints, copies made from yellowing old originals and then distributed in the hundreds of thousands \u2013 a necessary operation that makes it possible to analyse characters and stories we could recall only vaguely. But the consequence is fatal: memory crumbles and reveals all its make-up and wrinkles. Like Dorian Gray, the idols of our reminiscences show their true face in the clear light of day. How boring Flash Gordon\u2019s adventures were, how poor Pat Sullivan\u2019s early drawings, how unsexy the all-American girls in the first \u201cTerry and the Pirates\u201d.<\/p>\n Of course, science also demands its victims and through the flaws in the best-known, \u201chistoric\u201d products we can better understand their nature, and that of the society that consumed them. \u201cLinus\u201d had to print a whole lot of Li\u2019l Abner before we became fully aware that Al Capp was no radical satirist but a Fascist to be ignored. Thank God, today we know all about our myths. And we feel all the sadder for that.<\/p>\n Should say: \u201cThat is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all\u201d.<\/p>\n Once people discovered what historians already knew, that comics are a medium of communication for adults, which chanced to be passed on to children, comics for adults began to appear in Italy. Since American cartoons for adults were read by kids here, their elders felt a need for stronger meat. This led to the birth of comics about crime and violence. Well, just for once I don\u2019t feel so old. I feel like I\u2019m interpreting the vital reason for the \u201cyoung\u201d cartoons of the past while rejecting Italian noir<\/em> comics.<\/p>\n But I wouldn\u2019t like to be misunderstood. Let\u2019s not fall into the trap of moralism. Yes, I know, a boy murders his teacher, steals his money and then, bloodstained and still carrying the knife, he goes to the cinema, where he is arrested with a copy of \u201cDiabolik\u201d in his pocket. Deduction: reading \u201cDiabolik\u201d leads kids to kill teachers. Rubbish. If a kid is so daft as to kill someone and then go to the cinema still covered in blood, what do you expect to find in his pocket? Proust? But not even Nero Wolfe, who at least teaches you how to procure an alibi.<\/p>\n They arrest the murderer Cimino and find copies of Diabolik and Satanik in his hideaway. Immediately an indignant article appears on the arts page of the biggest daily in the north of Italy, signed by a winner of literary prizes, no less: see, those comics drove him to violence. Nonsense. In Cimino\u2019s hideaway there was also a chess set. What is the link between chess and armed robbery? What\u2019s a hunted killer obliged to lie low a for a few weeks supposed to do? Build a cyclotron and read Joyce? Crime comics are immoral because they are drawn badly and written worse. I have here an instalment with \u201cLola, the star of Diner\u2019s Club\u201d… We are at the level of myth worthy of \u201cCartoons for Dummies\u201d. If you want to tell me a story about violent crime, do so. But do it well. If the drawings of Diabolik\u2019s Jaguar car leave something to be desired in terms of perspective, the art teacher\u2019s judgement is good enough for me: the product is no good (and I\u2019m talking about Diabolik, the best of a poor bunch). With his Dick Tracy, Chester Gould tells blood-chilling tales, but the effect of the stylized drawings consigns the violence of the plot to a stylistic limbo of elegant graphic neurosis. Give your children \u201cThe Adventures of Jodelle\u201d or \u201cBarbarella\u201d to read, they won\u2019t become any worse than they are by reading scholastic anthologies and by commemorating our declarations of war. But don\u2019t let them have the phony animal liberationists who churn out Walt Disney imitations.<\/p>\n But as if magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen…<\/p>\n But luckily the boom, the facility of opportunity and the growth of a new readership has permitted some talented people to recreate Italian comics that make a contribution to culture. I\u2019m thinking of Enzo Lunari\u2019s \u201cGhirigiz\u201d, as good as the most renowned strips. I\u2019m thinking of Guido Crepax\u2019s visionary pop-up universes. Now that\u2019s drawing for you.<\/p>\n And so these new experimental comics have something in common with certain operations that have used comics to do things they weren\u2019t originally intended to do, as in pop art. With Lichtenstein the comic becomes painting and both painting and the comic have been deeply transformed by this. It is a symbiosis that turns the tables on the figurative and on abstract forms, too. A society becomes aware of its own dominant images: it doesn\u2019t matter if it does so with vigilant irony or with playful complicity. […]<\/p>\n I am no prophet \u2013 and here\u2019s no great matter…<\/p>\n The fact remains that in exploding into the limelight the comic has turned the tables on itself. As soon as it is rediscovered as literature for adults, we are obliged to reappraise the opinion we used to have on its effect on children. […] Experiments have been made on how images are perceived and it has been seen that comics have not introduced an elementary and spontaneous language comprehensible only to children: Fabio Canziani has shown us that the smallest children really don\u2019t understand when Goofy is angry, when Donald Duck is cross or when Cocco Bill is laughing scornfully. Understanding comics requires cultural training. Five years are not enough, you need a high school diploma at least. And it has also been discovered that the objection \u201ccomics encourage kids to look at the pictures and discourage reading\u201d is facile, because in most comics (and there was a debate about this in Paris two years ago with Roland Barthes) the task of the image is to stress emotions and to lay emphasis on symbolic content, while the plot is conveyed by the speech balloons.<\/p>\n Regarding comics, a vast area is opening up for education and we know very little about children. That comics are bad for children is still in doubt, what is certain is that children are good for comics (all praise to Charlie Brown and his friends). We know that comic albums might be bad for adults, and they certainly are bad for adults who are so overly cultivated they don\u2019t even grasp the basic grammar of comics and the cinema because they have spent their lives poring over books that they don\u2019t see as an access to narrative worlds but as cultural fetishes deserving of almost religious reverence.<\/p>\n Only one thing is truly certain. That the comic as problem no longer exists. What does exist is the problem of comics. As if (except in philosophical discussions), rather than pose the problem of cinema, a society were to pose the problem of a choice between \u201cBlow Up\u201d and Abbott and Costello movies. Or in the novel, between James Joyce and Mickey Spillane. Or in painting, between Picasso and Carlo Levi. When it comes to comics we can no longer judge Sadik and Neutron, Feiffer and Tiramolla, or tough guy Dick Fulmine and B.C. as aspects of the same phenomenon.<\/p>\n This means to say, at least, that comics are no longer some kind of carnival sideshow, but a cultural phenomenon, provided we strip the term \u201cculture\u201d of the aura of unjustified prestige that a grand conception of human relationships had reduced it to and restore it to its more unassuming sense as a repertoire and system of the various ways in which a group and an epoch make themselves known (i.e. \u201ccommunicate\u201d themselves).<\/p>\n"}],"edizione":"N\u00b0 5, 1967","custom_sticky":false,"autore":[{"ID":140,"post_author":"1","post_date":"2019-04-08 15:32:02","post_date_gmt":"2019-04-08 15:32:02","post_content":"\r\n Author, linguist and semiologist (1936-2016), he was one of Italy\u2019s most internationally-renowned intellectuals. Graduated in Philosophy from the University of Turin with a thesis on Thomas Aquinas, following a period in rai as a scriptwriter, he published his essay The Open Work <\/em>(1962), followed by Apocalypse Postponed <\/em>(1963). Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna from 1971, he was one of the supporters of the first course in Art, Music and Performance Disciplines (dams) in the same university. In 1980 he received international acclaim with the publication of his worldwide best-seller The Name of the Rose<\/em>, followed by Foucault\u2019s Pendulum <\/em>in 1988. His other successful publications include: Misreadings <\/em>(1963); Lector in fabula <\/em>(1979); Kant and the Platypus <\/em>(1997).<\/p>\r\n","post_title":"Umberto Eco","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"umberto-eco-2","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2019-04-15 16:51:51","post_modified_gmt":"2019-04-15 16:51:51","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/internal-pcons-be-fondazione-fr-dev-elb-1449244171.eu-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com\/?post_type=autori&p=140","menu_order":0,"post_type":"autori","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rivistapirelli.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/selezione_antologica\/3460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rivistapirelli.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/selezione_antologica"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rivistapirelli.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/selezione_antologica"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rivistapirelli.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rivistapirelli.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rivistapirelli.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rivistapirelli.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/assets.fondazionepirelli.org\/rivista-pirelli\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/11132400\/RP_1967_5_Meditazioni-su-di-un-baloon_003-da-unire-con-002.jpg\")
<\/p>\n