Io Pippo, review: 90 years and not hearing them

Io Pippo, review: 90 years and not hearing them

Io Pippo, review

Panini Disney celebrates Pippo's 90th birthday with Io Pippo, a full-bodied anthological volume that collects 10 stories from the recent and less recent past of Mickey's sympathetic friend and with which the distinctive traits of the character are brought to light. Pippo was conceived in 1932 by Pinto Colvig and the animator Johnny Cannon but was definitively characterized, also graphically, by the animator Art Babbitt only in 1935. After making his debut in short films, Pippo goes to comics where the brilliant Floyd Gottfredson chisels him as " definitive shoulder "of Mickey Mouse, giving it depth and charisma. His first made in Italy story is even dated 1938 (Pippo a commercial traveler) scripted and drawn by Federico Pedrocchi.



io pippo

An anthology for all tastes

Io Pippo opens with the excellent Mickey Mouse and the Genius in the Shadow by Tito Faraci and Silvia Ziche, in which the boss Rud McStud is convinced that Pippo is behind Mickey's talent for investigation. Obviously "silencing" Pippo will prove to be a very difficult task. We proceed with Pippo and the Green Apples: thanks to a book written by an encore of his encore, found in the attic, Pippo embraces the theory of gooey according to which thanks to a very thin slice of strictly green apple it is possible to find out if a person is honest or no. Mickey Mouse, decidedly skeptical, is therefore the victim of his friend's outrageous counter-proofs.


io pippo A “story in costume” could not be missing. In Sir Pippolo and the Knights of the Laid Table, Pippo is a careless knight committed to recovering all the ingredients of the merry rice recipe to restore Princess Minnie's smile. A feat that Pippo undertakes to help the jester Mickey to win Minnie's heart. Pippo and the Fattucchiera by Luciano Bottaro and Carlo Chendi is not only the oldest story in the volume, published on June 5, 1960, but it is also the most peculiar because Pippo, discarding the role of the "credulous", engages in a battle to the last empirical evidence against the witch Nocciola to prove that magic does not exist.

Pippo in: 3 × 2, again by the couple Tito Faraci and Silvia Ziche, is perhaps the story that best sums up the quintessence of the comic character Pippo. Our slouching protagonist in fact spends a day at the supermarket interacting in a surreal way with other customers but the motivation will be revealed only, incredibly, in the end. Pippo is also a skilled transformer, able to blend perfectly in any situation as in Mickey and Pippo in: The Two Mariachi when, on vacation away from Topolinia, the two are the victim of a misunderstanding and are chased by the local police escaping only by wearing clothes of two picturesque mariachis.


The volume Superpippo and the Garden Monster closes. Short stories starring the superheroic alter ego of Goofy committed to preventing an unlikely alien invasion led by those who seem to be, and indeed are, simple garden moles.

Io Pippo : 90 years and not feeling them

Italy has a very particular relationship with Pippo. In fact, if Mickey first represented a revolution (not only one of the first and longest-lived foreign characters published in Italy but also one capable of resisting the fascist autarchy) and then he embodied the economic boom of the 1960s, Pippo instead perfectly embodied the socio-cultural climate of the 70s and a certain awareness of comics as a medium (Andrea Pazienza docet) then escaping from the duck hedonism of the 80s to return with vigorous freshness in the 90s with the film that, for an entire generation, is a cult or Traveling with Goofy (which you can always retrieve on Disney Plus by clicking HERE).

Framing Pippo as a character is very difficult. He is certainly a shoulder, very precious and indispensable in many adventures in which Mickey Mouse would not be able to get by on his own but he is also a character with his own dimension, capable of returning to the reader a candid and disenchanted look on the world in which surprise and irrationality forcefully burst into the world. reality by offering an other, relative and plural point of view.




io pippo Graphically, the volume is quite homogeneous. Net of the more dated story present in the anthology, which it is good to reiterate it is however signed by two absolute masters such as Luciano Bottaro and Carlo Chendi, in fact the various designers who follow one another all have a modern and snappy trait and a setting of the table devoted to a storytelling, and therefore a rapid and immersive reading. Of course, Silvia Ziche stands out, with her highly expressive style and the use of horizontal doubles, and Massimo De Vita, with her rich style and the more heterogeneous distribution of space. There is also Paolo Mottura to report with his characteristic hatching and marked use of shadows, Andrea Ferraris's proof is also very good, mixing a certain urgency with the richness of the exotic setting.



io pippo

The volume

Panini Disney continues the proposal of these anthological hardcover volumes in 18.3 × 24.5 cm format. The paper is coated and the weight is important, the excellent binding also allows for easy reading. The print quality is excellent, also because in the specific case of Io Pippo they are quite recent stories, with the exception of the aforementioned story of June 1960, whose yield is still discreet. The editorial care is, as usual, very punctual as well as rich are the editorial contributions that include a preface signed by Lidia Cannatella, who makes a small historical excursus on the character, and short contributions that introduce the ten stories that make up the volume.







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