Guido Crepax and the Book Reviews in Comics Form: The case of La Fiera Letteraria (1967) and Linus (1994-95)

In the 1960s and 1970s, the first book reviews in comics form were published in the Italian periodical press, pioneering a new and revolutionary form of literary criticism. Marcello Piccardo on Il Giorno (1962-63), Guido Crepax on La Fiera Letteraria (1967), Tullio Pericoli and Emanuele Pirella on Corriere della Sera (1973-76) were the first authors to use the language of comics to describe and evaluate a book. Having fallen out of favor for a while, the genre regained strength in the 1990s with reviews by Mario Bortolato on Millelibri (1989- 1992) and above all by Crepax, in the famous comics magazine Linus (1993-1994), where he reviewed novels and films through the filter of Valentina (his most famous character) (Table 1). The strips of these authors represent an innovative verbal-visual combination between the form of book review and the language of comics. This subject has received little attention, although it is now alive and well in literary criticism and, even more, in film criticism (Boemia 2019). The aim of this paper is to examine how the critical speech changes in comics form.