June 1991.
The Queen have just given birth to Innuendo, their last album with Freddie Mercury, The Silence of the Lambs with Anthony Hopkins has scared the cinema audience and, most of all, Tim Berners-Lee, researcher at Cern, is about to announce to the whole world the solution to the problem of how to share documents among the scientific community using a software based on the idea of hypertext, which he himself has called World Wide Web: the site he puts on line is the first one in history, and o cially opens the Internet era.
In the course of this revolutionary 1991, exactly 25 years ago, the first number of Nathan Never arrived in our news-stands, the first science fiction series by Sergio Bonelli Editore, created by Michele Medda, Antonio Serra and Bepi Vigna. It was immediately loved by the public, especially by those who had been conquered by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. As the authors themselves explain, indeed, Nathan Never tells the story of a journey through time where you start from memories, but you are soon drawn towards the dream.
The story is well known, however it is worth going back to the beginning, so let’s recall it together: Nathan Never is an ex policeman and has a terrible past. His wife Laura has been killed by a criminal and their daughter Ann has been taken to a psychiatric structure, in state of shock after having witnessed her mother’s death. To pay for her therapies, Nathan, who had shut himself in a shaolin temple to learn martial arts, is forced to go back to work and accept a job as a special agent inside a private investigation company… This is where Nathan Never’s story begins. And now, after 25 years, it is time to celebrate. Special Agent Alfa actually started celebrating in April, first in comic book stores and in bookshops, then at the Comicon in Naples where, for the occasion, number 300 in color print was published, written by Bepi Vigna and visualized by Roberto De Angelis. And this is not the end. In May there was another great surprise for Nathan Never’s fans: the debut of “Nathan Never. Annozero”, the first of the three mini series of six numbers that “re-tell” the past of our Special Agent Alfa.
The exhibition presented at the Trieste Science+Fiction Festival displays some precious drawings and original materials selected for the purpose, offering an unprecedented historical itinerary on the traces of collections and special numbers related to the universe of Nathan Never, that from 1991 to today counts over 70 thousand drawings and 582 covers. The exhibition is curated by alino&alina with Glauco Guardigli, Bonelli’s editor, and is organized with the collaboration of important collectors.
Many characters of comic books live in an eternal present, but this has never been the case for Nathan Never. Right from the start, my colleagues and I decided that in his stories the arrow of time could have aimed both towards the past as towards the future. We were going to allow ourselves generous leaps in the characters’ memories, and frequent narrative prolepsis to anticipate future events. We were convinced that this very possibility of stretching within time would have become one of the key elements of the adventures we were about to create.
— Bepi Vigna
MAGAZZINO DELLE IDEE
friday 28 october
opening ore 18.00
saturday 29 — monday 31 october
10.00 — 13.00 e 16.00 — 19.00
tuesday 01 — sunday 06 november
10.00 — 20.00
Michele Medda, Antonio Serra, Bepi Vigna
Born around the 60s in Sardinia, they all meet in 1982 at the Cultural Centre of Cagliari “Il Circolo”. They join the group “Bande Dessinée” and start creating their first screenplays as a team for Martin Mystère, Dylan Dog, Zona X and Legs. In 1991 from the words and ideas of the so called “Banda dei Sardi” the science fiction saga of Nathan Never is born.
