Goldfish

The book

A comic book with a rich noir atmosphere recreated using Thirties drawing techniques and printed on “period” paper, accompanied by preparatory sketches, studies and comments by the author. More accustomed to the baroque-ish extravagance of the Western and historical genres, here the comic artist Alessio Alberici ventures into a whole new period that presents fresh challenges to his art. The subject chosen for this work is the private investigator Marlowe, a familiar figure in our collective imagination, and a short story he appears in, Goldfish. Little-known and published after his death, Chandler’s short stories were a sort of “secret workshop” used by the writer to shape works of wider scope, to build up the structure of his characters and the world they operate in, and it is here that Alberici found just the story he was looking for – stimulating and significant, in spite of (or perhaps precisely because of) the difference that separates it from the better-known film and comic titles.

With an introduction by Valerio Varesi.

The author

Born in Parma in 1974, Alessio obtained a high school diploma from the Istituto Magistrale Albertina Sanvitale in the city in 1993. He enrolled in the Faculty of Contemporary History of the university, which he left after a few months to concentrate exclusively on drawing, attending first the fine Arts Academy in Bologna and then the Brera Academy in Milan. He began working in the world of graphic design by drawing storyboards for a number of advertising directors in Milan, working in particular with Edoardo Amati, for whom he illustrated, in 1999, the opening credits for the short detective film Master Shot, presented at the Sundance Festival. In 2000 he created an advertising page in comic format for the Armed Forces, which was published in the national magazine of the Alpini Regiment. Again thanks to Edoardo Amati, in 2002 he drew, for Human Touch, the storyboard for the Armani Jeans advertising campaign, broadcast on the All Music and Videomusic TV channels. Since leaving the world of the storyboard behind, Alessio has worked for a number of newspapers as a cartoonist and as a realistic illustrator for a number of agencies in the Parma area. In 2005 he received an order for an illustration on Vittorio Bottego, printed in postcard format with a run of 400,000 copies. Goldfish is his first foray into comic book narration.

Technical details
Size 34.5 x 24.7 cm – pages 88
Cover: paperboard, outer coating in 140 gr. matt paper, two-colour printing, matt plasticisation, thick glossy transparent UV screen-printing. Interior: two-colour printing, thick glossy transparent UV screen-printing on 140 gr. Fedrigoni Tintoretto Gesso paper