One of this year’s guidelines is comedy, with expositions and events that want to highlight the connection between great masters and modern authors, and its centrality in the construction of the language of comics. The exhibition devoted to Jacovitti was designed from this perspective, after 20 years from his passing: more than one hundred pieces of work to try to understand the view and the founding reasons of his boundless production.

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The exhibition is an accurate selection that aims to offer precise insights on Jacovitti’s work, without following any chronological path and without focusing on the many characters created by him over 60 years.
First of all, the “panoramics”, great unanimous illustrations within which the author filled with surreal comedy in every corner, a practise that Jacovitti started while still underage and that accompanied him until the end. It is chronological selection of sequences from the stories produced between the late 50’s and the 70’s, which will allow Jacovitti’s works to be read and to discover the coloring technic used by the collaborators as precisely indicated by the author.
Finally, one room will be dedicated to Jacovitti’s peculiar way of representing his characters as actors, creating them by providing them with an improvising scenario, therefore constructing a distinctive triangulation author-reader-character dynamic, which often overruled the initial reading agreement, resulting in hilarious and surreal pieces of work.        For this occasion, a volume containing essays and unpublished articles about Jacovitti’s work will be released by Coconino Press/Fandango.

With Paolo Bacilieri, Maicol & Mirco, Luca Salvagno, Marco Taddei. Modera Alessio Trabacchini
This event is to reflect on the work of the master of comedy Jacovitti, and to compare it with the work of contemporary authors.

Jacovitti. Il teatrino perpetuo
edited by Hamelin
publisher: Coconino Press Fandango

In occasion for the exhibition at BiBOlbul, a book with essays and unpublished articles dedicated to the grand master Jacovitti will be released. The volume travels through the entire work of the author, investigating his poetics. In the first section, critics and scholars explore different aspects of this comics artist’s art; in the second section, some protagonists of the contemporary scene narrate “their” Jacovitti: Paolo Bacilieri, Maicol & Mirco, Marco Corona, Francesca Ghermandi, Marco Taddei, Miguel Ángel Martín and Gilles Bachelet.

Benito Franco Jacovitti (1923-1997) was one of the most important, famous and beloved Italian comics artists of the past century. Born in Molise, universally known as Jac or Lisca di pesce, he started to publish comics strips when he was very young in the late 30’s. Since then he never stopped, collaborating with the most important newspapers for children, including Il Vittorioso, Il Giorno dei Ragazzi, Playman, and Linus, also drawing successful homework diaries and commercials. Jacovitti dealt with every kind of genre: from western to swashbuckler drama, from sci-fi to crime stories, always according to the parameters of his mocking surrealism, his cruel perfidy and his unhinged sadism; well-known elements that make his extended production a totally coherent world.