This month I wanted to bring a short interview, what we might call a suggestive interview, in conversation with Tommaso Di Spigna, also known as Spugna, comics author and illustrator. An urge born mainly after reading one of his works from 2017 (perhaps the most famous), “The Rust Kingdom”, whose pages particularly fascinated me: inexplicable worlds, absurd bodies and formless creatures.
Hi, thank you so much for answering me and for being here! If you'd like to introduce yourself and describe your work, now is the time to talk about form and pro forma.
Hi! Thanks for the invitation. I'm Spugna and I make comics, which really says it all already. To go slightly more into detail, I usually make comics with hideous monsters beating the crap out of each other.
I'd like to hear a few brief words from you on the world of independent comics, on self-production and finally on Hollow Press, which seems to me the most natural home for a project like yours.
Right now it has never been so easy to make comics, even in so-called “independent” comics. The hard and crucial part these days is getting the attention of omnivorous readers used to a bulimic and often distracted consumption of billions of stories, comics and otherwise. Since I began my path I have always made only the comics I would have wanted to read myself first and foremost as a reader, without thinking about any “market niche” or anything like that. This allowed me to be very recognizable and personal right away, and fortunately it paid off both self-producing and with more or less independent imprints, giving me the chance to always do "my own thing" and build a fierce, enthusiastic following.
Hollow Press is the perfect home for the more auteur part of my path, the riskiest and most complex one, where I almost always start projects without knowing exactly where they'll take me. It's a deliberately dark, weird, fantasy and underground label, it is literally my favorite publisher, though I didn't know I wanted it in these precise terms before it was born. Like all brilliant things, in retrospect you just think "well, but it's obvious! Isn't it?"
In your works I'm fascinated by the bodies; every now and then I seem to glimpse Baron Harkonnen (in Lynch's film version) in a comics guise, puppet-like, stitched together, inside an episode of Adventure Time. Cronenberg-style special effects, manga-like action scenes, weird culture aesthetics and caricatured characters. Basically I seem to be looking at puppets made of flesh, of which there could exist a plush toy made of animal tissue and sewn with woolen threads. On one side I see a disproportionate strength and monstrosity, but on the other a fragility, as if everything could break. I'd be very pleased to know something about your vision of flesh and your relationship with it.
Flesh is indeed one of the themes that recur obsessively in my work. It comes precisely from the pleasure I get from drawing weird, puppet-like figures, but as I grew up I integrated this childish passion with a taste for, and an inquiry into, the sense of corporeality and its degeneration. As a kid, Cronenberg's films, Carpenter's The Thing, the paintings of Otto Dix and Bacon changed me forever. We are evolved apes who created concepts like "soul" and "spirit," hoping to be ghosts piloting a physical body, but deep down I believe we are really just miraculous bags of walking organs, and that's it. This materialist thought seems cynical and ruthless, but from my point of view it amplifies everything, it makes reality infinitely more terrifying but also human experience infinitely more beautiful and precious.
I'd like to ask one last question about the apocalypse, which touches not only the fantastic, almost Kenshiro-like worlds of Rust Kingdom but also your most recent work with Feltrinelli, “La Quarta guerra mondiale”. I'm using this question also to expand on the little piece I wrote last month about the end of the world. In your works there's no fear of showing rot, dystopias, the end of everything. Is there some meaning, some specific motivation? How do you face the more realistic apocalyptic prospects outside of comics?
More than a meaning, for me telling "the end" is very simple, relaxing. I can create something and bring it straight to its conclusion. I think it's in irreversible transformations that a story can be truly interesting. As for how I live with the constant thought of a probable apocalypse? Well, badly. Maybe there's a big problem of distrust in my generation, but for quite a few years now I've lived with the fairly concrete feeling that I will probably witness some kind of collapse before I'm old. As a brat I watched Kenshiro and growing up I've read and seen endless possible apocalypses, so surely part of those narratives has "educated" me to this.
Humanity remains a marvelous thing too, but deep down maybe I don't have all that much faith; let's say I cuddle up in the thought of my own irrelevance. This too, on one hand, can be a terrifying thought, but to me it gives great relief. Then I do sort my recycling, eh, but maybe that's because I'm a pain in the ass.
Can you recommend an album as a soundtrack for “The Rust Kingdom”? Looking among the most hidden music you can think of?
As a listener I'm an undisciplined mutt, but I'd say a name I dug up while listening to random stuff on YouTube fits perfectly. The album "The Valley" by Blvck Ceiling.
English translation of the Italian original. Read the original →