Mattaglia (Mad Wars)

“Mattaglie” (Mad Wars) is a word you won’t find in the Italian vocabulary, it unites the words “Matte” (mad, crazy) and “Battaglie” (battles) and represents one of the most prominent and recognized moments in the work of Luciano Bottaro.

An appropriate name for these authentic jewels of vis comica and graphic commitment, which, among the playfulness, also makes us reflect on war and the futility of conflicts.

It is a small world based on paradox, the one of these crowded comic-war snapshots, where unlikely men-at-arms sunbathe while smoking a pipe, read amid clouds of arrows, play cards, and even look lustfully at beautiful half-naked girls who somehow ended up in the conflict.

Luciano Bottaro began to draw his medieval brawls in 1967, when the new magazine Redipicche was being created. The Rapallo native took a pencil and paper and drew two funny armies that were beating the crap out of each other. "To bring a little order to the chaos, I decided to garnish the scene with a joke", the Maestro recalls, "Who has lost a pearl button, hold up his hand!".
The first Mattaglia, even if no one calls them that yet, of the series was finally born.

Bottaro makes no secret of having been inspired by Antonio Rubino, his artistic beacon since the beginning, who, in a magazine published at the time of the Great War, "La Tradotta", indulged in drawing humorous conflicts between Italian and Austro-Hungarian soldiers.

Redipicche will publish, without a title, four of these extraordinary melees, then reprinted in the legendary "Un Mondo di Fumetti", and then they will find space in the Corriere dei Piccoli. It is here that the director Luciano Visintin, with a splendid intuition, suggests to Bottaro to call them "Mattaglie".

There are roughly fifty of them of various formats and all drawn in pen or ink: even if sometimes published in color, they certainly are at their best in black and white, as the Maestro himself preferred. By the way, an original Mattaglia is preserved in the huge museum that Mort Walker himself, the great author of Beetle Bailey, has organized in Boca Raton, Florida.

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Being a huge fan of Bottaro's work, I'm incredibly happy to own one of them, and also one of the oldest, from the 70s!!!

Text roughly translates: "You're fined!"
Sign board: "No Wars Allowed"

Huge thanks to Francesco and Andrea!!!


Paper size: 32.2 x 38 cm