“Seoul is a very intriguing city with so many contradictions,” he told The Korea Herald. “Its multilayered streets are full of surprises. There is gentrification going on in many places, but some places are still true and original.”

The 45-year-old artist added, “I could hear jazz in many cafes. I’m a big fan of American filmmaker Woody Allen, and as a romantic city, Seoul would be the perfect backdrop for a Woody Allen film.”

Varbella came to Korea in late January to promote Italian comics and strengthen cultural collaboration between the two countries. He met Korean cartoonists and writers and enlightened audiences with the history of Italian comics at seminars. Upon returning, he will publish a graphic novel about Korean contemporary literature, drawing on his experience here.

“Now in Italy, comics are everywhere,” he said, “There are popular comics, graphic novels, newspaper cartoons and educational drawings.”

Varbella added that characters like “Corto Maltese” -- an enigmatic sea captain in an adventure comics series who lives in the first three decades of the 20th century -- have been hugely popular among adults since the late 1960s.

“Italy has a long history of popular comics,” the artist highlighted, mentioning characters “Tex Willer” -- a tough guy with a sense of vigilante justice, wearing a ranger hat -- and “Dylan Dog” -- as part of a horror comics series featuring an eponymous, paranormal investigator.

Disney Italia has produced sublime works, he said, with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck entertaining the postwar imagination of a recuperating nation.

Varbella, who began his career as a graphic designer, said he sketches ordinary life and enmeshes it with surrealism and fantasy, “to see beyond the facade of reality.”

“I am interested in the human conditions,” he said. “I caricature the everyday life, its love stories, jealousies and capriciousness. In most of my works, I insert supernatural elements, which is not intended for science fiction or horror.”

For instance, the author has brought to life a puppet monkey -- a main character’s alter ego and imaginary friend -- to mirror the ethereal human subjectivity.

In Italy nowadays, Varbella explained, there is a resurging interest in the past, a nostalgia-tinged longing for “the golden age.”

“We are all stuck in this retro-mania in the West,” according to the cartoonist. “Europeans believe the past was beautiful and life was simpler. There were jobs, money, music and love in the 1980s. Today’s life has become fast-paced, complicated and unstable by the forces of globalization, digitalization and automation.”

Although himself not a romantic about the past, the artist acknowledged he took inspirations from the 1920s and ’30s for his creative work.

“Young people in Italy have ‘second-hand nostalgia’ about the 1960s and ’70s,” he said. “They yearn for these eras through images and ideas they gathered from the internet, although they weren’t actually born at the time. Records that no one listened to in the 1970s are suddenly big these days.”

Harking back to his observation of Korea, Varbella said he noticed Koreans’ desire for emulating Western cultures, through brands such as Paris Baguette, although “they are not the real things in Europe.”

“There should be more bridges between the two sides to authenticate our mutual understandings,” he argued. “Japan and its comics are well known in Europe, but not Korea or Korean comics. I believe the cartoon can lay the first bridge.” 

Angela Gioe, director of the Italian Cultural Institute, said his institution organizes some 60 to 70 events annually to promote Italian art, music, film, dance, theatre and universities. Italian comics will be showcased at the Seoul International Book Fair in June.

“Italy is very strong in music, particularly the operas,” he said, adding Korea’s national theaters and companies have featured Italian operas written by Verdi and Puccini. “Over the last three years, we translated many Italian books into Korean and gained strength in literature.”

The first two of writer Elena Ferrante’s “The Neapolitan Novels” -- “My Brilliant Friend” (2012) and “The Story of a New Name” (2013) -- a four-part neorealist series, have been translated into Korean since last year, selling more than 100,000 copies.

The Italian Design Day will be held at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul in March, followed by an exhibition about Pinocchio at the Seoul Museum of History in April and the book fair.

“Many Italians love Korean cinema,” he said, citing film directors Kim Ki-dok and Park Chan-wook. “Korea has many other talented movie directors, and can enlarge the promotion of its cinema as well as contemporary art in Italy.”

By Joel Lee (heraldcorp.com)