storytelling, recreation of the models of the past and, finally, the social position
and value of the genre. Nevertheless, in all of these areas the results continued to
be both very complex and ambiguous. The difficulty of making a good script, for
instance, seems rather easy to solve, but in practice this is far from certain truth.
Wasn’t the transition from sequel publishing in diaries and weeklies to albumlength stories a perfect occasion to risk more ambitious types of narration?
Unfortunately, this new direction interfered with the rise of direct colouring, the
importance of which had become so paramount that there was hardly any room
left for more narrative dimensions. Very soon, many readers were longing once
again for the charms of the ancient series and sequels, yet as the prevailing host
medium was now the book rather than the newspaper or the magazine, the defaults
o f storytelling only became more and more visible. In spite of their artistic
pretentions, much European comics of the eighties could indeed be read as rapidly
as Japanese mangas! The influence of the album model, together with the
hypostazing of characteristics best known in the contemporary models, also caused
the influence of the newly discovered old masters of the first decades in the century
to remain rather superficial.
Second, the banal revitalisation of old schemes and examples had been
turned into a set of explicit and systematic classification of stifling self-reference.
In the eighties all respectable albums had to be saturated with every imaginable
type of allusion relative to the leading models of yesterday’s authors, i.e., the authors
who were being read in the fifties, when the authors of today were young and were
discovering the comics. However, this tendency of storytelling “in the second
degree” has only given birth to a long story of epigonic repetitions and annoying
“inside” jokes^’. The technical perfection of the imitators (because they could draw
very competently) was not sufficient to compensate for the defaults that such a
citational practice inevitably raised. On the one hand large sectors of the audience
were excluded and comic strips only addressed the happy few able to taste the
subtleties of allusion, pastiche, and remake or other intertextual games, while those
deprived of previo W2