Dick Fulmine | Karavansara

As mentioned in a previous post, the Fascist Regime was bad juju for the pulps in Italy, but the genre did reflect on comics.
Graphic narratives were popular, and probably easier to manipulate.
A few American comics were “adapted” and later pirated by Italian artists – “Tim Tyler’s Luck” became “Cino & Franco”, Mandrake had its dialogues extensively rewritten, and a series of apocryphal Flash Gordon stories were published when the originals could no longer be imported.
The Regime feared the readers could still be seduced by the American way of life, even through adapted and manipulated comics.

With the American comics gone, the field was open for original heroes. And if “Lucio l’avanguardista” was probably the most all-out fascist-friendly comic book hero, the most popular was certainly Dick Fulmine.

NOTE: I’m indebted to my friend Alessandro Girola, who first wrote about Dick Fulmine on his blog, Plutonia Experiment.
Much of the research behind what follows started on Alex’s page. Continue reading →

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 →