RIP Stelio Fenzo

 Cartoonist Stelio Fenzo has died

Fumetto

April 8, 2022

 

The Italian cartoonist and illustrator Stelio Fenzo has died at the age of 89. Born in Venice in 1932, Stelio Fenzo was a very prolific draftsman. He made his first works at the age of 14 for the diocesan newspaper La voce di San Marco and at the same time he met the authors of the magazine Asso di Picche , including Hugo Pratt, Mario Faustinelli and Alberto Ongaro.

In the early 1950s, after a series of collaborations with newspapers such as Gazzetta del Popolo and Gazzettino Sera , he began working for Il Vittorioso . He later moved to England, where he worked on detective and war comics for the Fleetway publishing house and pink comics for Thompson.

Back in Italy, in the sixties he inherited from Hugo Pratt the work on the drawings of Kiwi , a comic published by Fasani and created by Giancarlo Ottani and Pratt which told the African adventures of a young boy raised by animals, in the wake of Tarzan. Pratt always gave him the work to the drawings of another series, Capitan Moko (previously Capitan Cormorant ), in which seafaring and colonial adventures in England in the 1700s were told.

In the seventies he began a long collaboration with the weekly Il Giornalino , for which he created the western Tales of Saloon (1972-1976) based on the texts of Raul Traverso. The series was born from an idea of ​​Don Tommaso Mastrandrea, then head of the Roman editorial team and since 1976 director of the magazine. The protagonist of the comic was the classic "old man of the West" who from time to time recounted his exploits as a youth (as a soldier, cowboy or pony express).

“I never liked the western, not even in the cinema, but it was fashionable. Il Giornalino then offered many western series (I remember that in almost every issue of the magazine there was a story by Larry Yuma ) and so I had to adapt, starting the series a little reluctantly. I was forced to look at the films with John Wayne and Gary Cooper on television to design clothes, horses, weapons. I made this series out of duty, but in the end I was also fond of it", recalled the author in an interview granted to Roberto Guarino and Matteo Pollone of the Allagalla publishing house, who in 2019 completely re-edited the Amar Singh stories drawn by Fenzo.

Amar Singh , one of Stelio Fenzo's best known works, was also published in the Giornalino in the 1970s. Written by Renata Gilardini , it told a colonial story set in India in the first half of the 19th century. At the center of the story was the British nobleman William Vernt, an officer of the 27th Bengal Lancers sent to Bahawalpur to carry out a mission on behalf of the East India Company. On the spot Vernt met King Teg Singh, who entrusted him with the education of his nephew Amar Singh so that he could become a great warrior.

“I am very satisfied with the series. It was a big effort because there was no internet at the time, which nowadays helps a lot with documentation. It was a historical series set in India in the 1800s and therefore there were the uniforms of the English, the typical clothes of the Indians, the weapons, the settings. I helped myself with many books and many films. At one point there was the television Sandokan that gave me a great hand. Working with Renata Gelardini was truly a pleasure. She was a very cultured woman and she never gave trivial material to make”, Fenzo reminded Guarino and Pollone di Allagalla.

For the Giornalino Fenzo made many other comics, including Simba (texts by his wife Loredana D'Este, 1978-1985), I due del Sudan (texts by Mino Milani, 1990), Ninja turtles (texts by his nephew Fabio Fenzo, 1994) -1998) and various literary adaptations such as An American at King Arthur's Court , by Twain (texts by Toni Pagot, 1999) or Kim , by Kipling (texts by Paola Ferrarini, 1992), with atmospheres very similar to those of Amar Singh .

In the seventies and eighties he also worked for the various publishing houses of Renzo Barbieri, including ErreGI, Ediperiodici and Edifumetto, making some detective stories ( Odeon series ), pornographic ( Tabu series ) and horror ( Macabre and Horror series ) and creating long- lived publications such as Jungla , which told the erotic adventures of an African virgin, or Belzeba, with the erotic adventures of a hermaphrodite devil.

 

FENZO, Stelio

Born: 9/3/1932, Venice, Veneto, Italy

Died:  4/8/2022, Mestre, Veneto, Italy

 

Stelio Fenzo’s western – cartoon artist:

Saloon – 1972-1976

L’ultimo dei Mohicani - 1993