RIP Dino Attanasio

 

Dino Attanasio, the first Italian cartoonist in Belgium, has died

Fumetto Logica

By Redazione

January 17, 2026

 

On January 17, at the age of 100, Dino Attanasio died, ninth above all for being the first Italian author to have moved to Belgium to make comics and for the drawings of the Spaghetti series.

Born in Milan on May 8, 1925, Edoardo Attanasio known as Dino was the son of a musician. He fell in love with comics as a boy and studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and, during the war, participated in the making of the first animated feature film produced in Italy, The Rose of Baghdad. In the mid-forties he also made his debut in comics, drawing for example some episodes of Furio, a character by Gian Luigi Bonelli for the Audace publishing house, and starting to collaborate with the Belgian publishing house Edital, together with Augusto Pedrazza, creator of Akim, and Roberto Renzi, inventor of Tiramolla.

The turning point in his career, however, came in 1948 when, together with his brother Gianni, like many Italians, he emigrated to Belgium: not to work in a factory or in a mine, but as a designer, first for an advertising agency, then for comic book publishers. In fact, he was soon noticed by the World Press, an agency that provided stories, illustrations and articles for the various newspapers, and his first collaboration was with two future legends of the bédé such as Jean-Michel Charlier and René Goscinny, on whose texts he drew the Fanfan & Polo series for Le Libre Junior.

The most important collaboration, which was born in the fifties, and which lasted decades, was with the weekly Tintin, which in addition to the adventures of Hergé's reporter published series such as Blake and Mortimer and Michel Vaillant, but also many free stories. It was on these that Attanasio tried his hand at the beginning, both in humorous and realistic style. He did the same with other publishers such as Spirou, for whom he drew some episodes of Les belles histoires de l'oncle Paul, and Les Petit Belges.

In the realistic field, he is best known for having inaugured, in 1959, the comic adaptation of Henri Vernes' Bob Morane novels. This ability to vary style remained a characteristic of his entire career, even if over the years he ended up preferring a humorous style inspired by that of André Franquin. The Italian cartoonist thus became one of the most important representatives of the so-called "Marcinelle School", a trend to which Morris, Peyo and Albert Uderzo also belonged, as opposed to the "clear line" of Hergé and Edgar P. Jacobs.

In 1952 the Italian-Belgian cartoonist created his most famous character, Mr. Spaghetti. It was the self-deprecating caricature of an Italian immigrant, stereotypically drawn with a thick black mustache, which remained in the drawer until 1957, when the editor-in-chief of Tintin did not push him to dedicate a series to him in collaboration with Goscinny. Spaghetti thus became the protagonist first of self-contained tables, then of longer adventures fueled by a humor based on puns and distortions of French by Italians, and on stereotypes about our compatriots.

Goscinny wrote Mr. Spaghetti until 1965, when – overwhelmed by commitments to Asterix, Lucky Luke and Pilote – he passed the baton to other authors. Attanasio instead continued to draw his creature on Tintin until the end of the series in 1978, and then in a handful of non-standard albums. The success of the character also made him the protagonist of four animated short films (in Italy, Spaghetti was first published in 2025 by Nona Arte).

Another series for Tintin to which the Milanese cartoonist linked his name was Modeste and Pompon, with the characters created by Franquin himself and also written by Goscinny and Greg. When, in 1959, the former left Lombard's weekly to return to work exclusively on the competitor Spirou, he personally recommended Attanasio to continue his work.

Attanasio also worked for Italy, without ever moving from Belgium. In 1965 he inaugurated, in fact, for the Corriere dei Piccoli the series Ambrogio e Gino, on texts by Carlo Triberti and published in part also in Tintin. The protagonists are two Milanese plumbers (as can be seen from their names), father and son, involved in spite of themselves in funny adventures seasoned with interesting glimpses of daily life of the time.

In 1968 the exclusive collaboration with Tintin was interrupted, and Attanasio began to work for other magazines, carrying on Spaghetti, creating series such as Macaroni and the gangster Johnny Goodbye, very successful in Flanders and the Netherlands, as well as drawing several self-contained albums, including a comic version of Boccaccio's Decameron.

ATTANASIO, Dino (Eduardo Attanasio)

Born: 5/8/1925, Milan, Lombardy, Italy

Died: 1/17/26, Belgium

 

Dino Attanasio’s western – comic book artist:

Bandonéon – 1970-1973