I Am Gonzo. My Dirty Italian Zines Serious Scientific Books

“I Am Gonzo” is a research-book that attempts to chronicle the scattered but significant landscape of Italian erotic-porn comics. Gonzo is the immersive, amateurish technique the authors have chosen to investigate a type of publishing that, though poor and inferior, has a sensual carto-aesthetic and a high rate of collectability. But Gonzo is also a person, amateur-porn addict who collects and consumes in an “animal” way these enjoyable objects, who owns them by hiding them among serious books. This research creates a mega-collection of this porn-comics, a true pioneer genre of the so-called “dirty” Italian comics, fantasy-horror-proletarian that moves from its prurient and spicy, then sensual, then erotic and sexophobic beginnings (1960s. 1970s) until a porno-violent drift (1985-2000). The book brings together a visual selection of comics, text-essays, a text-conversation, the exhibition moments that contributed to the development of the research, and a final regest of all the comics collected for the artistic-editorial operation. This updated edition offers a new selection of comics to replace the previous one and two new covers.