Marco Ficarra, born in Palermo in 1968, has being living and working at Bologna for twenty years. Known in the comics editorial field for his graphic and editing activity with the Ram studio, Marco has developed in these years a personal career which has lead him, besides graphic work and the development of new methods of lettering, to deepen his relation with drawing and storytelling. After the big format paintings and some social short stories, in the last years Ficarra has conducted a double research in the comics language and family history.
In fact, in 2009 came out for Becco Giallo Stalag XB, his opera prima, which rises from the letters that Gioacchino Virga – his father’s cousin – send home from the prison camp where he had been deported by Nazis. The reading of these testimonies becomes the spur for telling a human story, a universal story and not just bounded to the single family affections.
Through the letters are reconstructed the transfers of Gioacchino Virga in several lagers, after the capture in Greece in 1943, and his long staying at the Stalag XB, the big concentration camp where many Italian soldiers were sent to, and where the young soldier will die of freezing and starvation on March 14th 1945.
Thanks also to the documentation at the Istituto Storico Parri of Emilia-Romagna, made up of thousands of pictures taken by lieutenant Vittorio Vialli during his confinement, the author reconstructs the almost unknown condition of Italian prisoners, not considered as the other ones (Geneva Convention was not applied to them and they couldn’t benefit from the help of International Red Cross), their hard work, even for 14 hours a day, in the fields, mines and military factories. All this is done with a naïf and expressionist style, made of broad brushes that convey with precision the freezing atmosphere of prison camps and the suffering on the prisoners’ faces.