Italy is not a country for pulps.
Maybe it’s because when the pulp era was at its peak, the Fascist Regime was at its peak, too, and it enforced a strict censorship on American fiction.
Characters like Doc Savage or Conan would arrive in Italy only in the ’70s, and we complitely missed The Shadow and The Spider, and all the other heroes.
Burroughs was somewhat luckier – because his novels hit the shelves before Mussolini’s rise to power.
And movies and comics fared better, too – because they could be translated and adapted: there’s the old story about Mandrake working with the Nazis, in his Italian version.
With Mandrake, Flash Gordon, the Phantom (known in Italy as “L’Uomo Mascherato”), Tarzan and many others, pulp tropes percolated in the Italian comic industry.
So it was in original comics that Italy gave its greatest contribution to the pulp genre – with original characters like Dick Fulmine (we’ll talk about him) and, somewhat later, with Pantera Bionda. Continue reading →