HI! I'M A COLLECTOR OF OLD ITALIAN COMICS MAGAZINES FROM THE '30S AND THE '40S, FILLED WITH ONE OF MY MAIN INTERESTS: THE GREAT AMERICAN SYNDICATED COMIC STRIPS!

My name is Leonardo. You can e-mail me at: leongor@tin.it

This The Comic Strip Classics Web Ring site owned by Leonardo Gori.
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I'm a proud member of the CSC mailing list, devoted to classic American comics. I have found some good friends there, and also discovered that the beautiful Italian (European) comics magazines are not well known around the world. So, I decided to show to interested people a little of what this material can offer to comics enthusiasts.

First, a little hystory of comics in Italy.
Comics were published in Italy from December, 23, 1908 on a magazine called Corriere dei Piccoli. They published at first Outcault's Buster Brown, Swinnerton's Tom, Opper's And Her Name Was Maud. For the next 50 years, the magazine published a lot of other syndicated comics (like McManus' Their Only Child and Bringing Up Father, Swinnerton's Little Jimmy, Outcault/Messmer's Felix The Cat, etc.) and beautiful italian comics (Antonio Rubino's Quadratino, Sergio Tofano's Signor Bonaventura, and many others). But all this stuff was heavely reformatted, cut, and - the worst thing - the balloons were omitted.
In 1932 (December 17) the first issue of Jumbo was published, full of British comics, but with some interesting American material (like Broncho Bill, Rube Goldberg's Boob McNoot, etc). It was the first magazine with balloons and adventure comics, and it started the "Golden Era" of comics in Italy.
In the '30s and '40s, there were two kinds of comics magazines:

1. "giornali" ("newspapers"): weekly, large format, 6 to 16 pages, with many syndicated series on 6 dailies-a-week basis, or one sunday page (and also Italian strips, of course). Corriere dei Piccoli and Jumbo were "giornali".
2. "albi" (comic books): similar to American comic books, they started in 1933. They reprinted complete stories in an "oblong" format.

On December, 31, 1932 Topolino (Mickey Mouse) was started by Nerbini Editore, first with Italian "apocryphal" Disney comics, later with the great Gottfredson's daily and Sunday strips. At the end of 1933, Topolino started to publish Tim Tyler's Luck, ghosted by Alex Raymond, with the episode of "Carlos", the emperor of the jungle (dailies 5-8/10-21-1933). This was the very beginning of the great adventure comics strips in Italy.
On October, 14, 1934 Nerbini published the first issue of L'avventuroso, a very large format weekly magazine with the very best of KFS features: Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon, Jungle Jim and Secret Agent X-9, Sullivan & Schmidt's Radio Patrol; after 1935, L'avventuroso printed also Mandrake, Phantom, Red Barry, Terry and The Pirates, and so on.
L'avventuroso was revolutionary in the Italian scene. Editor Vecchi transformed the weekly L'audace in a sort of Sunday L'avventuroso (with Brick Bradford, Mandrake, Radio Patrol, etc, all in the Sunday edition). A lot of other beautiful weekly magazines started in the '30s, like I tre Porcellini, Paperino, Giungla!, etc.
In the fall of 1938, the italian Ministero della Cultura Popolare prohibited most of the American comics, except the Disney strips. Some heroes returned, in disguise after 1939, until Italy entered in the Second World War against USA (Dec. 1941).

In the next months, I hope to show you most of this material. For the moment, enjoy some covers (since the dimensions are quite variable, I have formatted them all at the approximately the same size)...

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