Zerocalcare, doctor in impicci

This article is published in number 1 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until January 5, 2020

There are cases in which someone, from above, looks down and puts a patch. This must also have happened with Michele Rech, born very shy, but also gifted with two talents who have the advantage of being excellent excuses to stay on their own: an extraordinary hand for drawing and a good breath for running. The result of the practice – solitary – of both is that today Zerocalcare runs 1 kilometer in 4 minutes and 30 seconds.

And that he has two graphic novel books (Skeletons e To dead Santa, both published by Bao) in the ranking. The ranking is both general and that of Italian fiction.
Thirty-seven years old, in the most terrible year ever, his popularity has exploded thanks to his Rebibbia Quarantine, mini lockdown stories much more effective for the mood of the choirs on the balconies, and to his television appearances as a guest of Propaganda Live. L’Espresso put it on the cover calling him “the last intellectual”, an event that caused scandal and controversy among those who aspired to the title, and aggravated his already dramatic insomnia, treated with milk and plumcakes and readings in the middle of the night ( “The writer’s voice silences mine. Sometimes,” he explains). The evacuation of the Cinema Palazzo in Rome took care of restoring inner calm: “The police beat us, but this washed away my paranoia.” Because, as he says: «I’m not someone who makes comics and is busy. I am a Taliban loaned to comics ».

A Taliban who goes on TV?
«I went on TV in the year when everyone was in front of the TV, because they couldn’t go out. This has produced strange things, like that now people stop me on the street. ‘
He never seems so happy when he’s inside that little screen.
“There are few things I consider worse torture than being on television.”
What explanation can we give for its success?
«I have been thinking a lot on the subject. At first I thought it was a generational question, then I realized that very different people were following me, by registry and worlds of origin, and in the end the answer I gave myself is that my stories are liked because they speak of fragility and insecurities, that those who have them carry them with them all their life ».
What are the “hindrances”? I ask for those who are not from Rome.
“The trouble is all that’s keeping you from being smooth and resolved. I don’t even manage to focus on the problem, but you know it doesn’t make you feel at peace with yourself ».
Is the hindrance something that does not go away?
“At this point I think I can say that no, it doesn’t pass. I went through all ages and all conditions and it seems to me that the trouble was always there. It survives everything because it declines according to the context, but above all it survives because it is a crooked piece of ourselves ».
Do you get attached to your hindrance?
“There are those who make rhetoric about it. I even built a job there ».
Can we say that with two books in the charts it has become mainstream, or does the concept suck?
“It sucks me, but it’s a fact.”
Can mainstream and radicalism be kept together?
“You can try it by getting an ulcer. The fact that so many people read me, to me who by nature I do a lot of mental blowjobs, conditions me a lot: I ask myself the problem of being more understandable, didactic, do not assume that people already know what I’m about speaking, leave no ambiguity. There are, on the other hand, aspects that I don’t want to be touched by the idea that 100,000 read to me. For example, not withdrawing from my political positions. There are people who write to me: “If you think so I will never read you again”. Patience. I cannot betray myself and my community of belonging ».
What is your community of origin?
“I call it a tribe and I put social centers and punk into it, my family as well as that of blood. I don’t have a social network that goes out of that stuff. “
Isn’t that a limit?
«No no, on the contrary, I need constant confirmation from that world. The horrible thing about Covid, for me, was that it canceled the concerts which were the occasions in which I could verify that certain people continued to greet me, even if I go on TV. Not having that feedback puts me in great difficulty. But a few days ago it was my birthday and among the greeting messages there were also those of people who are just on the opposite side of the TV and the newspapers. This reassured me a lot ».
Did they put a stamp of approval on you?
“I need continuous stamps.”
Was he a strange, different child for Rebibbia, the neighborhood where he grew up?
«Yes, but not for a question of culture, nor of social extraction, rather for how I was made. I avoided talking to others in every way. The first time my mother told me she was going to leave me with the babysitter – who was my cousin – I was 5 years old and I replied: “Okay, but I can’t spend the afternoon nursing her”. Growing up, things didn’t change: I was never the one who went dancing with friends. Then I met punk and I found a community of people who were all different in their worlds of belonging and I felt welcomed among them ».
When did you realize that drawing was your way?
“It was a very bumpy ride. After the G8 in Genoa my drawings had come out of my bedroom, I hoped it could become a job, but everyone was slamming the doors in my face. I lived doing other jobs: I did a lot of call centers, I worked at the airport, I gave French lessons, I translated hunting and fishing documentaries. Then, in 2010, a friend of mine sent a story to a magazine directed by Makkox, he published it and it all started from there ».
Had anything changed in your work between the doors in your face and the publication?
“Zero. I sent the same plates. Only that time I got ass. The history of the Armadillo Prophecy, my first book, I took it to 100 publishers and no one answered me. When it then came out self-produced and was successful (and a film that went to Venice was born, ed) are all back ».
Do you remember the first table you drew?
«A story copied from Dragon Ball about my teacher and my classmates. But I don’t have one, he has one who was in class with me. That one day he showed up at a copywriter of mine with a binder full of the drawings I did at school. I didn’t know, but he kept them all. ‘
Why is the protagonist of your comics always you?
«They are autobiographical stories, I don’t have enough imagination to imagine something different. Telling something that happened to me seems less arrogant to me than telling stuff I imagine or someone else told me. If I talk about my own things, I have the authority to do so. If not, I don’t have it. ‘
In Skeletons tells what it means to raise boys in a working-class neighborhood
“There’s this myth of the alpha male. I have never been and for years I experienced this very badly, then I found the tool of irony to dismantle it ».
Is there still that myth?
«In the cultural bubble there is a lot of talk about how to be male: what can be done and what not. The problem is that it is the debate of an elite. Most people don’t give a shit, in fact, they don’t even know there’s a debate going on. To a gigantic piece of this country it seems normal to say whore, whore and fagot. Perhaps it would be necessary to make compromises on the downside to be understandable to other parts of the world, who otherwise see certain speeches as crazy stuff ».
The male, he says, then evolves and starts a family. One thing that the protagonist of your book, that is you, lives very badly.
“I do not think rationally that it is realized only within the family, I know that there are people who find other paths, I myself come from a family in which, for many years, there was only my mother. But when I see my friends entering the Mulino Bianco box, and I don’t, I feel in default. It really weighs me. Then I sit on the river bank and wait for them to devour. ‘
Rome, or rather Rebibbia, is an essential piece of his stories. Could you live and work elsewhere?
“Whatever I did outside of Rome would be half a comparison with Rome. Even when I went to Kobane (to support and tell the resistance of the Kurdish people, the experience is told in the book Kobane Calling, ed) it was all a “would you go and live there or would you stay in Rome?”. For a mistake I was born in Arezzo, but at the age of two months I was already in Rebibbia. And I will die here ».
Instead maybe he will go to live in Geneva.
“As of now, I give permission to come and take me from the house with pitchforks if I leave this neighborhood.”
But you are a man full of moral rules!
“If I depart, then 10 years of guilt await me.”
Which then, in his comics, become hideous monsters that inhabit his belly, like the one he drew to represent the sense of guilt of not having graduated.
“I tried to go to the university, but it was the most inhospitable place on the planet: full of people who had known each other since high school, who secretly exchanged information that was forbidden to me. I got fenced the first time, and I stopped going. But I made my mom think everything was fine, so I spent eight hours a day on the subway, back and forth from one terminus to another. Then, one day, he found out everything. We were disappointed because in its nineteenth-century conception, culture is not used to work, but to be better people. In the end she gave herself peace, but I didn’t. “
What do you mean?
“I’m in awe of graduates. Even if I think that someone is a cojone, if he tells me he has a degree he immediately seems much more intelligent than me “
Then take this piece of paper!
“But if I didn’t make it then, imagine if I have the strength now. It seems to me that as a boy I was better ».

To subscribe to Vanity Fair, click here.