ALTAN, FRANCESCO TULLIO (1942) Italian cartoonist and illustrator born in Treviso, Italy, in 1943. Francesco Altan left for Brazil after finishing his art studies in Italy; while in Latin America, he contributed cartoons and comic strips to a great number of publications. Returning to his native Venetia in the early 1970s, he freelanced for various Italian magazines.
Altan enjoyed his first success with Trino, a kind of bungling demiurge busy with the creation of the world on orders of an omnipotent boss, himself not quite sure of his intentions. This story first appeared in the monthly Linus in 1974 and was later collected in book form. It contained nothing irreverent, but it displayed Altan’s wit and irony and indulged in some good-natured ribbing of famous characters from the past, a feature it shares with his political cartoons.
These often focus on workingmen—an important aspect of Altan’s satirical work, and one common to many other contemporary Italian political cartoonists. Where Chiappori, for instance, pillories the men in power, Altan makes his point indirectly, through the seemingly genuine and spontaneous comments of assembly-line workers: this is a means of putting the political cartoon in a simpler, more immediate context.
Altan is also an illustrator who, in the pages of Il Corriere dei Piccoli and in children’s books, depicts fabulous and fantastic worlds midway between unreality and poetry. Both in his political cartoons and in his children’s stories Altan always displays the same sparse style, without frills and somewhat naïf.
The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons, 1980
