Known in his native Italy and around the world as a novelist, short story writer, painter and poet, Dino Buzzati took a late-in-life leap into unknown territory in creating Poem Strip (Poema a Fumetti), which is a fascinating blend of all his skills in one work.  Originally published in 1969 when Buzatti was 63 years old, equal parts epic poem, surrealist drawings, and graphic novel, Poem Strip is structured around a contemporary reworking of the Orpheus myth – that contains at least a nod to the Jean Cocteau film – with Orpheus (Orfi) here rendered as a rock star set on rescuing his love, Eurydice (Eura) from the underworld.  Buzzati builds out from this core with a series of stream of consciousness meditations on sex and death – and bureaucracy – depicted as surrealities composed of decaying cityscapes, rotting aristocracies, mutated technologies and a great deal of feminine pulchritude.  So, yes, very much the work of an unreformed Italian male of his time, but certainly formally inventive and thematically interesting, nonetheless.

An Italian author and illustrator best known for his 1952 novel, The Tartar Steppe, a Kafkaesque take on WW II that based in part on his own experiences, as well as for a series of classic children's books, including The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily, Dino Buzzati here presents us with his swan song in Poem Strip.  An unusual synthesis of words and pictures, it just barely qualifies as comics... but it does.  Created when the author was in his 60s, and set in a highly hedonistic and fabulously fleshy rendering of the "swinging sixties," it is a retelling of the Orpheus myth, casting a pop/rock singer/songwriter in the lead.  It makes for an intriguing read, and the most fun comes from sussing out the symbol-laden artwork.  There is no getting around the male gaze of the artist and fetishization of the female form on display here, nor can one avoid the equations of sex, sin and death, but these are all part of the formula that links the multiple mythic memes of the Mediterranean.  The republication of this classic simultaneously provides a missing piece of both the puzzle of the 1960s and the development of the graphic novel. (translated from the Italian by Marina Harss; hand lettered by Rich Tommaso!)