Italian comics of the 60s & 70s

Fumetti is Italian equivalent for comics. The term "fumetto" itself means "small puff of smoke" and refers to the balloon that contains the personage's dialogs. The earliest fumetti was published at the end of 19-th century and appeared as cartoons and illustrations for younger readers. During the years of fascist regime (1922 - 1944) comics publication was set under ideological supervision, but they also came to be widely produced and publicly recognized.

After World-War-II the recovery of the civil and political life was accompanied among other things by the rising publishing activity and the spread of the comics strip production. Some of the magazines tried to repete their themes of the pre-war period, but nearly the all of them had a short life. Numerous publications presented American adventure strips like Mandrake, The Phantom, Flash Gordon addressing mostly teenager audience.While American adventure strips continued to attract part of the new adolescents, it did not returned to the power that it had exercised in prewar period.

	articles and resources: Fumetto: A Short History of Italian Comics Appunti sulle origini e sulla storia del fumetto italiano Storia del fumetto: Il Fumetto in Italia

At this time "photo romances" (fotoromanzi) became popular especially among feminine audience. Substantially different from the comic strips, the "photo romances" conquered wide masses of readers embezzling them from the comics.

Comics Diabolik first published in 1962 under the title "Il re del terrore". The Giussani sisters wrote much of the stories until 80s. The most significant artist that worked on the graphical design is Sergio Zaniboni, who has been drawing this comics since 1969. Diabolik gave birth to several epigons, including Kriminal and Satanik. The latter where created in the 1960s by one of the most famous duos of comics history, Magnus & Bunker, whose most outstanding creation was however the humoristic espionage series Alan Ford (1969).

Achiving a huge success fumetti industry attracted many talented writes and illustrators like Sergio Bonelli, Hugo Pratt, Sandro Angiolini, Milo Manara, Leone Frollo (to mention really few). Some of fumetti illustrators like Milo Manara became famous world wide, survived the genre crisis of late 80s and later adopted their art to the age of digital media and the World Wide Web. In 60s fumetti was frequently blamed for challenging existing morale and was occasionally censured by authorities. Now days they became an artifacts hunted by comics collectors.