Il Viaggio, review of the comic by Marco Corona
Il Viaggio
Il Viaggio is Marco Corona's latest work, as well as the eleventh publication of the Stigma Project edited by Eris. Comics are a dream journey into a past-present where reality and fantasy no longer have borders and limits, in which everything is possible, even more so the violence and strictly human atrocities. The Journey, however, is also a story of ghosts, perhaps, which reveal all their fragility of lost souls, of infernal spirits, attached to life as well as to the memory of their present and past lives. The story does not have a time, but it is to be recognized in the undisputed protagonist of the story, the Levis' villa.A dimensional and timeless story that takes us on a real dreamlike and lysergic journey into a visual world new and experimental, where nothing is trivial but everything has great significance because, behind the delicate artistic fiction, there is a masterful awareness of the means of communication.
The story of Il Viaggio
As we have already mentioned, the story does not have a defined time frame and this, at the beginning, could destabilize the reader who finds himself catapulted into medias res and fails to fully understand the facts that are told, table after table. Understanding, however, comes as soon as you immerse yourself in reading the contents. We know the protagonists of the story, they are the members of a family torn apart by the death of the daughter of Giuseppe Augusto Levis, a count whose figure appears clearly contradictory. A violent womanizer torn apart by the disappearance of his child. Next to him we find his wife, a "living" zombie whose only refuge from the atrocious reality that she does not want to accept is drugs, in this case morphine. The one of the two parents will be accompanied by the memory and the story, more participatory and sentimental, of the other son of the couple who is also trying to find his sister again, without throwing himself into the despair of drugs.We were saying also that the real protagonist of the story, however, is the now dilapidated villa of the Levis family. In a distant era, which we cannot know, this residence was wonderful, unlike those who lived there, and continue to live there. We discover this already from the first pages in which Count Giuseppe Augusto spares no words of hatred for his wife and his servants, during a journey in a carriage. Over time, it has become one of the "gates of hell", which is different for everyone, and therefore even more terrible. In a time shift, the house, which continues to be inhabited by the count's family, or by the ghosts of its members, has been transformed into a refuge for the city's addicts, becoming, even more, the emblem of perdition. br>
The story, therefore, is translated on different and not distinct temporal planes, which become a single story having as a guiding thread the story of this family and of the villa. The most interesting parts are certainly those told by the young Levis who manages to make friends in this "contemporary" life with some children of the neighborhood who, curious, enter the villa. The boy explains his experiences to the pages of the diary, citing the final monologue of Shakespeare's Richard III which, in this context, fits perfectly to make the reader understand the extreme pain of this timeless child, with an irrepressible identity and a lack lacerante, his sister.
The themes and atmospheres
The themes dealt with in the comic are different, Marco Corona's is a story of ghosts but also of violence and loss, of due failures to different aspects. We have the plague of drugs and the synecdoche of hell, understood as part of a whole that tears apart the souls and flesh of those who enter the circle. But the personal one of the Levis house is not only a place of atonement, it is also a source of lack, that due to the absence of the missing young girl, a sort of ghost, as are the shadows of her relatives, deprived of any human aspect if not despair.The atmospheres, then, are very suggestive. The reader can get lost in the rarefied and lysergic settings that can be admired in full page. The prevalence of black over white allows us to experience the suffering of the protagonists directly, without filters. The “obscene” scenes and images allow us to understand the infernal side of perdition and the wearing down of the flesh due to the very deprivation of the meaning of life. A reading that can be approached from truly varied points of view, that of Corona's work, who here is confirmed to be one of the most interesting authors on the Italian scene.
The author is able to use different techniques to different contents of the work. The scenes and times change, and so his style changes, especially in the realization of the human figures, now sketched, now, instead, rich in details and very realistic. Even the landscapes are detailed and superhuman, like the silences that comics give us, those that transport us to another dimension making us infinitely rise one (among the many) possible meanings of the work, it's up to us to choose it, as in the greatest contemporary artistic tradition.
