Foreign ‘Contamination’: American Comics in Fascist Italy

L’Avventuroso (1934-43)

❖ In 1934 publisher Mario Nerbini

launched L’Avventuroso, a magazine

based on American adventure

comics.

❖ It introduced heroes such as Flash

Gordon, Mandrake, The Phantom, and

Jungle Jim, changing the taste of its

young readers.

❖ For the first time, Nerbini published

the original American strips without

adding any captions or eliminating

speech bubbles.

❖ The success of the American formula

revolutionised Italian comics: Italian

artists had to adapt their style to the

new model to attract readers.

Fascism and American comics

❖ The Italian Fascist regime considered

children the future of the nation. It

began using magazines to educate the

children to the Fascist ideology.

❖ American comics were being

published since 1904 but were altered

in their appearance: speech bubbles

were substituted with captions.

❖ In 1932, adventure comics were

published for the first time, but still

adapted to the Italian traditional

predominance of words over images.

Censorship❖ After 1936 the Fascist regime

launched a campaign for the cultural

‘autarchy’: no foreign influence.

❖ 1938: American comics were

considered as contaminating Italian

children’s education and were thus

forbidden.

❖ Nerbini Italianised American heroes

to keep publishing them but after the

declaration of war on the US (1941)

any American imitation had to

disappear. The number of copies sold

of L’Avventuroso drastically fell.

❖ After 1945, post-war Italian comics

clearly show the influence of the

American model, demonstrating it

had been incorporated into Italian

culture.