Strips 5 and 6 - Interview with the Author (part 2)

Strip 5 - click on the image to enlarge

Strip 6 - click on the image to enlarge

Above, strips 5 and 6. Below, our interview with Silver continues.

Silver, you were telling us that, in the 1950s, photonovels were a huge success and largely unavoidable: was it the structure, which sits on the fence between written language and images, that led you to develop a passion for comics?

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Silver: "Not only the structure, but the content, too. It wasn’t just sentimental love stories for bored 1950s’ housewives – there were cowboys, sheriffs, murders, and shiny Cadillacs. And that’s how I discovered a whole new medium, one that used drawings instead of photographs and could therefore open the door to a whole new world: comic books.

My American peers were probably luckier than I was, at least with regards to access to comics. I didn’t have many at all – there was no money to buy them and most of them had yet to be translated into Italian. But at least I had Mickey Mouse. At five years old, slowly following each word, letter by letter, I learned how to read thanks to a story called Mickey Mouse and the Black Orchid. I may have been a stuttering loser, but at least I had learned how to read.

Thankfully TV was catching up too, supplying more and more American and European cartoons, and I could finally spend hours watching shows that ranged from the Adventures of Pow Wow, to the more educationally-oriented and moralistic Yugoslavian productions, to The Huckleberry Hound Show, The Alvin Show, The Flintstones and The Jetsons, Bugs Bunny and Sylvester the Cat, as well as the dozens of characters created for the popular Italian TV cartoon segment called Carosello.

As the supply grew, so did my unquenchable thirst for making up new stories and new characters. Sadly, my drawing and writing skills would not cooperate. And I’m pretty sure I already mentioned that I was afflicted by a stuttering problem."

...to be continued.