Zanardi (comics)

Zanardi (full name: Massimo Zanardi) is a comics character created by Andrea Pazienza, arguably his most famous creation.

He is the main actor in a series of graphic novels which appeared in installments on several Italian comics magazines during the early 1980s. Zanardi first appeared on Frigidaire magazine in 1981, in Giallo Scolastico ("High School Mystery"). The character quickly found an enthusiastic audience in the clique of young, artsy, new-waveish Italians who were disillusioned with the previous decade's political slant and were instantly hooked on the character's basic, hedonistic individualism and cynicism, tempered with cultural influences ranging from Joseph Conrad to Vladimir Mayakovsky.

The Zanardi graphic novels were reprinted several times in the decades following Pazienza's death, in original (black and white) and colored form. Pazienza's original drawings were mostly colored by his wife, Marina Comandini, but some episodes have been coloured by unknown students in Bologna's Art School, to which Pazienza gave the original drawings on a whim.

Character traits

Zanardi is a 17- or 18-year-old Italian high school student at the fictional Liceo Scientifico Enrico Fermi in Bologna. He is a tall, blond, thin, well-dressed In Massimo Zanardi, L'Inesistente ("The Nonexistent") a young girl who is in the same class as Zanardi writes in her diary: "But he's so elegant, and he came to skool in a black tuksedoe ...
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