The Italian (Milky) Way To Science Fiction 3

Meanwhile, as Italian fiction tried until Tutti i denti del mostro sono perfetti to engage in a serious way with sci- fi, thanks to the pushing of the Urania prize, another media had brought the genre out of the fandom ghetto and had put it in an entirely new pop perspective. This was a medium that was able to sell hundreds of thousands of copies each month; a media that since the Thirties had told amazing fantastic stories. It was 1991 that the comic Nathan Never22 appeared in newsstands published by Sergio Bonelli Editore, the largest Italian comics publisher. Nathan Never is still today on sale in the newsstands throughout Italy and the regular series has arrived this month at issue number 262. The comic, despite a certain originality of the protagonist, was, has been and still is a melting pot of international science fiction that goes from Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Stanislaw Lem, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A. Heinlein to Star Wars, Blade Runner and Star Trek, from Judge Dredd to Gundam, Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor, Akira and Neon Genesis Evangelion. Nathan Never is a pop product that rarely or almost never, despite the quality of many stories, dares to explore the dark side of the human soul, so arousing the Unheimlich. The stories of Nathan Never were more concerned with technological progress and, to a lesser extent, with the sociological dimension, than with the human condition as opposed to what will Evangelisti would do in describing the journey of the Malpertius spaceship, where the technological aspect is absolutely secondary to the psychic one.

A year later, in 1992, another science fiction comic appeared, set in a less remote future than Nathan Never, but it was gloomier.