Zerocalcare between Netflix and the Milan exhibition: «The armadillo? He advises me to run away”

Netflix, or: the eye of Sauron

Citizen of the world by constitution (his mother, otherwise known as Lady Cocca, is French), Zerocalcare largely owes its international explosion to the success of the Netflix series. Him, in his stories of Instagram, the platform of stream represents it as the eye of Sauron in Lord of the Rings, an abstract entity that is the personification of absolute evil «however, if I have to be honest, in working on the series they didn’t break me about anything. I made them several seemingly suicidal proposals about the format and they always accepted them. I had also proposed practically the same project to Rai and Sky and I remember that they set many more limits, because there they have programming needs that Netflix does not have. Netflix people are very careful only that there are no characters who utter racist or sexist sentences. In my stories there will certainly be profanity, but situations of that type really don’t. From what little experience I’ve gained, I can say that today, for those who produce content, the big problem has become what to make racist characters say».

Among the Ezidi of Shengal

With the latest book, No sleep till Shengal (circulation of 234,000 copies), returns to reportage in the form of a graphic novel, recounting his journey to Iraq among the local Ezidi community, threatened by international tensions and protected by Kurdish militias. A “civil” graphic novel, as it had been Kobane calling: «Comics», he explains, «have the advantage of not being 100% faithful to reality, but of being faithful to what I think. And this adds a level of empathy with the reader». Will we ever see a graphic novel about the war in Ukraine signed by Zerocalcare? “I would say no. I’m not interested in the war itself. When I talk about Kurdistan or Shengal, it’s a different matter: I’m interested in telling about the society they are trying to build there».

Author vs. character

Zerocalcare, in its stories, always speaks in the first person. As for the relationship between Zerocalcare “author” and Zerocalcare “character”, «often I make the latter more naive than I am in real life: in comics, for example, I get the Kurds to tell me things that, as an author, I already know. It is a narrative device that serves to clarify concepts to the reader that perhaps are not so obvious to him». Then it’s going to end up that «the real Zerocalcare, in real life, imitates the character. It serves to make the stories I’ll tell tomorrow more interesting: my life, his, would be too boring.’

It is difficult to agree with him on this last point. Because, in the life of Zerocalcare, there is a whole world inside and it is made of the same material as the imagination of Generation Y. Because Zerocalcare is a voracious consumer (and re-use) of pop culture, starting with comics: «I read all the Marvel releases, not always great but some very good. I’m following for example carefully Dare devil and the Punisher». On the bedside table it has UFO 78the latest book by Wu Ming («I’m enjoying it. For the rest, I mostly read noir, authors like Winslow and Lansdale»).

Punk and TV series

On the musical front, he knows he is “proudly niche”: he is obsessed with the punk of Bull Brigade and Nabat (“I listen to bands that make 500-copy records, with the mainstream I stayed in 2001”), but he does not disdain the era of reproducibility on streaming platform. «I like seriality, I watch everything related to Marvel ea Star Wars, for instance. Even if two out of three releases disappoint me. Talking about the last things I saw, I liked them Andorone of the best derivatives of Star Wars since the first trilogy, if we don’t consider the seventh installment, Derry Girls and as well House of the Dragon, I’d say. Curious that Andor came later Obi-Wan Kenobi which, on the contrary, was rubbish, but with streaming platforms it works like this ».