Divine drawing and human hand. A conversation with Nicola Mari

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For those who have made comics a passion or their domestic cult, it is a renowned name, that of a Master. For all the others, it should be nonetheless: Nicola Mari, pillar of Sergio Bonelli Editore, is the hand holding the power to turn a white panel into the universe of Dylan Dog, giving it three dimensionality and then plunging it into nightmare.

From his debut at the age of twenty with the erotic comics for Edifumetto, he moved to the Acme publishing house before being hired among the ranks of Bonelli, where he was entrusted with the s tories of the newborn sci-fi comic Nathan Never, of which he made some of the best books. Then it’s Dylan Dog’s turn. A predictable fate for the one who is today considered the Master of Italian gothic comics, and who has an all-encompassing love for this series. The fiery baptism with the Craven Road investigator took place with the text of the giant Tiziano Sclavi, creator of the series. Since then, Mari has worked tirelessly to render his mystery to reality – which is the very mission of this art, the one able to generate the reader’s participation.

A refined and clean line, at the same time rich in intensity, of a cultured author, with a holistic approach to knowledge and a passion for philosophy, in particular the Greek one. All elements that sediment at hem of his style, and form a solid base.

Nicola, I would begin by asking you to introduce us to comics, which are an art form, but also a communication form, to their characteristics and their evolution. How did this discipline come into being and how has it changed, in terms of technique and in taking hold of society, and what is its audience? Comic strips as we know them today were born in 1895, when the American designer Richard F. Outcault had the idea of inserting the dialogues of the characters inside a cloud of smoke. But the origins of comics in a broader sense could even be traced back to prehistoric cave paintings or, continuing for large temporal leaps, to the pictograms of hieroglyphics, in which language was entrusted to images; coming up to the Middle Ages, in which the lives of the saints were often narrated by illustrations in sequence between them, or by the words painted with gold that came out of their lips, in the sacred representations within the Gothic cathedrals. The narration entrusted to comics continues in the first half of the nineteenth century with the novels “drawn” by the Genevan Rodolphe Töpffer, and then grafted onto the comics by Winsor McCay and by the painter Lyonel Feininger, at the dawn of the twentieth century – when comics, together with cinema, became a mass phenomenon in constant evolution and able to generate different approaches and different ways of defining themselves, from American superhero comics, to strips, to French bandes dessinées, to graphic novels, to underground comics, and so on.
An equally heterogeneous audience corresponds to this kind of heterogeneity, typical of comics. A semantic richness, therefore, capable of bridging the distance that separates the different languages participating, as a whole, in the organization of the collective imagery, in the way a society reads itself. Comics, thereby, are much more present in our lives than we can imagine, perhaps to confirm that nothing is more unknown than the known.

What value can comics have today, within the world of communication? What kind of aggregation does they have around them, and what differentiating and unique element can they boast, compared to other forms of art?
Comics are a complex organism, a refined synthesis of different languages which, in this singular combination, finds its own specificity. The value that comics can have in communication is probably in relation to their own ability to communicate with all the areas that make them up; which is why the comic reader is very often also passionate about cinema, literature and all the fields nourishing comics and, in turn, nourished by them.

Speaking of languages, especially applied to current and global issues such as climate change, how much strength do you think a universal language like the comics’ one can have?
In brief, humankind has gone from a conception of nature intended as a dwelling, to a conception of nature exclusively intended as a reservoir for a limitless exploitation. The humankind that preceded us, in order to guarantee its own survival, was used to take advantage of the environment insofar as it preserved it, and therefore at the passage of the plough the land could still germinate and become more f lourishing, just as the sea waters could still come together again at the passage of the vessel. In our time, instead, the feeling is that the logic of endless growth does not contemplate the possibility of the limit, after which, Plato already warned us, one must fear for his own destiny.
How far a universal language such as the comics’ one can intervene in such deep and complex processes is difficult to predict and perhaps even to hypothesize. However, I am convinced that a language such as that of comics can undoubtedly express and convey what Immanuel Kant called a regulative idea, that is an ideal vision to strive for which, while not being realized, can nevertheless awaken the critical capacity and mitigate the harmful effects of a system.

My mention of climate change has not been accidental. The lines that Nicola Mari drew for Ossigeno #09, through The face of another, crossed the border of the single page and now follow a precise trajectory, which will meet that of other artists in the near future. We would like to join that regulative idea, in the hope that it will be able to mitigate the effects of the great enemy of the twenty-first century, also thanks to Nicola Mari and the artists that, through his curatorship, he will be presenting to us for our next issues and for these pages.