The Selfish Giant and Other Fables

The Selfish Giant and Other Fables

When the horrific component meets the fairytale one, the result can only be surprising. Drawing on popular tales, great classics and masterpieces by Oscar Wilde, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and John Ruskin, Dino Battaglia reworks in his very personal, acute and experimental style, eleven stories that have fascinated entire generations over the centuries. His most typical dark and gothic colors are combined with dreamy and evocative atmospheres, in an operation that goes beyond mere synthesis and transposition and leads to new characterizations of the narratives.

From this incredible work by the Venetian artist, considered one of the greatest comics authors ever to exist, his comics culture and his intelligent use of the linguistic system of cartoons emerge forcefully: the figures and environments emerge from the edges of the frame, the they determine, fragment it or even merge with it. In some plates there are iconographic references traceable in the thirteenth-century engravings of the illuminated incunabula, or in the late eighteenth-century medievalism and the romantic period. And the adaptation choices prove to be revolutionary: the famous Cinderella by the Grimm brothers becomes "Ceneraccio", declined in the masculine, offering a non-parodic but alternative vision; and in Andersen's Nightingale of the Emperor three characters from the Italian commedia dell'arte are added, Arlecchino, Balanzone and Tartaglia. A refined operation of reworking of stories, fairy tales, tales that gives a new character to them without betraying their original intentions.

The eleven stories contained in the volume:

          The King of the Golden River, by John Ruskin

          The King Bazzaditordo, popular fairy tale

          The Princesses at the Ball by the Brothers Grimm

          The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep, by H. C. Andersen

          The Emperor's Nightingale by H. C. Andersen

          Rumplestiltskin, by the Brothers Grimm

          The Tinder box, by H. C. Andersen

          The Firebird, folk tale

          Giamìl the Unfortunate, from One Thousand and One Nights

          Ash and Greybeard, from Cinderella by the Brothers Grimm

          The Selfish Giant, by Oscar Wilde.