Ten years ago, on November 22, 2011, an unknown cartoonist who called himself Zerocalcare presented his first book in public for the first time at the Quattrodita comic shop in Rome. The book was called The prophecy of the armadillo and it had been released almost clandestinely a few weeks earlier, in 500 self-produced copies. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the first presentation, and today that Zerocalcare has become very famous and celebrated, the publishing story of the book and its surprising and enormous success with the public was told by Andrea Fiamma on the site Comics.
At the end of the 2000s, Zerocalcare sent some of his stories to the editorial staff of the magazines Animals e Canemucco, both published by Coniglio Editore. In fact, the e-mail was sent by a friend of his, because Rech, after receiving the rejection of publishers and organizations (one year he even tried to participate in the Lucca Project Contest), was “quite discouraged that my stuff could be published by someone”.
“It struck us all in unison,” said Makkox, cartoonist and today author for television (Propaganda Live), which he directed at the time Canemucco. «The usual vocal polyphony of“ maybe ”,“ boh ”,“ for me it can go ”,“ I don’t like it ”, that time was tuned in chorus of“ THIS YES! ABSOLUTELY YES! “, Followed by the allelujahs.” In Zerocalcare, Makkox saw a commonality «in the way of telling: we talk about us, about what we know, what we live, small and big things. And we like to do it on the borderline between laughter and melancholy, capturing the irony, the self-mockery ».
The first story, released on Canemucco 1, represented the debut of the Armadillo, the consciousness in animal form of Zerocalcare: With the anonymous, a story already containing all the stylistic features that would have made the author famous – observations on tedious aspects of everyday life, in this case the paranoia in front of a call with the unknown number, the anxious and constantly anxious quality of the protagonist, the pop quotes (in four pages there is space Boss Artiglio, Star Wars and the Cat and the Fox).
– Read also: How did his Zerocalcare series
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