Time.news – It is an achievement to be able to exchange a few words with Zerocalcare, pseudonym of Michele Rech, surrounded by fans of all ages who want to shake his hand and have an autographed copy of his latest book but in the end the effort is rewarded: he mocks and minimizes the fact that he is among the most awaited guests of the “More books and free” Fair. 2023 is full of news for the designer: not only will he turn 40 but a new TV series will debut on Netflix. After the success of “Ripping along the edges”, it is now the countdown to the most anticipated streaming appointment of the next season.
He greets me with a smile, and recoils when I jokingly call him a ‘rock star’.
“This success is just an impression, because since I make drawings and since it takes more time to make a drawing, queues build up and people think there’s a crowd waiting. In reality I am slower than those who sign and that’s it, and therefore this success is only a great illusion”.
Yet there are many young people here and all with a book in hand. You certainly have the merit of having brought an entire generation closer to appreciating comics, to strengthening its communication role in the age of the mobile phone. Since 2011, from “The prophecy of Armadillo”, the road traveled has been long and fruitful…
“I was very lucky because I caught a moment in which the comics market changed radically in Italy in the sense that people began to realize that comics are not a genre but a language and that everything can be done with comics, from cookbooks to love stories and science fiction. So I was lucky enough to arrive exactly at the moment of that change and I clung to it very strongly because I simply don’t know how to do anything else. That is, I didn’t have a plan B, and when I realized that that thing worked, I invested a lot of energy and a lot of time into it. In fact, it went very well for me, and I had a super response from the public”.
People queuing for a Zerocalcare autograph
And about the new TV series, “This world won’t make me bad”, what do you tell us? Is the story autobiographical?
“The title does not refer to me but to a person of which the series will better explain who and why. I can’t say anything else except that it will be a more organic work than the first, the episodes will be longer, half an hour long, with a more structured horizontal plot. So potentially much more difficult and which inevitably makes me so anxious”.
Right, let’s talk about anxiety. We’re all a little anxious these days. How do you manage it?
“I don’t manage it, I’m in disarray. I trudge and try not to think about things much later and just focus on the anxiety of the next 15 minutes.”
In 2023 you will turn 40, an important age, which often represents a milestone. In short, it’s time for balance sheets, will you make one?
“Mine is a positive balance from a professional point of view, in the sense that my job has gone great, I’m doing very well with what I like to do, so from this point of view I’m lucky. All the rest of my life, on the other hand, is in disarray in the sense that people build families around me, structure themselves in all fields and I have a lot of holes in which I trudge precisely because I have dedicated the last 12 years to work in hyper intense way and on everything else I feel extremely behind. So at 40 I get there very well on the one hand, and on all fours on the other…”.
Let’s get back to work, then. Your latest book, entitled “No sleep till Shengal”, deals with a very interesting topic. Why did you choose it?
“It’s a travel diary made last year in northern Iraq, in the land where the Ezidi are. These people were massacred by ISIS in 2014 and have since returned in arms together with the Kurds to take back their land despite having suffered a genocide in which more than 6,000 women and girls were kidnapped, raped and sold as sex slaves and many of them have not yet been found.
A dramatic picture that made them decide to defend themselves from that moment on, and to structure a radically different society with women at the center and with a coexistence of all religions. Right now, this people is threatened on the one hand by Iraq which wants to regain control of that area and on the other by Turkey which is now fighting them on a daily basis because it considers them friends of the Kurds, and therefore terrorists and the idea of us we started is to try to tell what is happening”.
We all need a good wish for next year. What’s your?
“Let’s hold on…”.