Cartoons
Readers of the Don Camillo stories must all be familiar with those cute little "angel/devil" pictures Giovannino Guareschi drew to go with them (some of them decorate various pages of this website). But as far as the range and sheer volume of his cartooning output is concerned, those sketches barely represent the tip of the iceberg. The other 90% is made up of hundreds of provocative, witty, and very topical cartoons and caricatures produced for periodicals such as Candido, the weekly political/literary paper GG edited and wrote for between 1946 and 1961. These cartoons, which were generally single panels with captions, range in artistic style from "mere" doodles to more detailed drawings, but the humor is consistently sharp and direct. Of course, because their targets were current (and sometimes local), and the "joke" often dependent on some not-easily- translatable pun in the caption, these satirical gems are not widely known today outside of Italy. This is, perhaps, inevitable, but is no less a shame for it.

As one would expect, Communism was a frequent target of GG's pen-and-ink, and he actually became quite notorious for his standard depiction of a Red as a goofy-looking fellow with three nostrils (or, sometimes, as a three-breasted woman). Indeed, in the Introduction to The Little World of Don Camillo, GG speaks with some pride of the notoriety this caricature gained him. But Guareschi was equally willing to skewer his "own" party-- that is to say, the party with which he was identified after helping them to win the 1948 elections, the Christian Democrats-- when he disagreed with its representatives.

Above are some of GG's triple-nostrilled Reds. I guess the third nostril was supposed to be for the extra hot air.

Also fair game for the Guareschi treatment, besides political topics, were the eternal social subjects-- marriage, materialism, the theatre, cultural differences, and various human foibles. Indeed, these subjects were predominant in GG's pre-War cartoons for Candido's precursor, Bertoldo, since in those days Fascist censorship made direct criticism of the government impossible. I think of these social satire cartoons as GG's "New Yorker- style work."

Above: "Gigantic wife with tiny, henpecked husband" is a classic GG image. I'm told he drew these battle-axes as a deliberate alternative to the gratuitously sexy females preferred by many other cartoonists. [Note: The color is not original to the drawing.]

Above: GG gives us a "Hamlet" as Hollywood spectacle-meister Cecil B. DeMille might have "improved" it...

Finally, throughout his career, a favorite subject of GG's caricatures was... GG himself! And as he grew older, he seemed to use his self-caricatures both to cultivate and to lampoon his own image as a bit of curmudgeon.

Two later self-depictions: Though the figure's scowl belies the cheery message, the picture on the left bore the inscription "Buon Anno" ("Happy New Year"). And on the right, Mrs. Guareschi stands next to another fierce-looking GG, both waving from a turret meant to represent their home in Switzerland (where they lived a few months out of every year, for GG's health); the occasion for this drawing was the birthday of son Alberto, at home in Italy.

Illustrations
There was more to Guareschi-the-artist than cartoons. For instance, he also drew what I suppose one could call more "conventional" illustrations for some of his stories. These include a set of nine color plates originally prepared for the first edition of the German translation of The Little World of Don Camillo (i.e., Don Camillo und Peppone, Salzburg: Otto Muller Verlag, 1950). These are traditional- style illustrations, by which I mean that they are fully- composed pictures depicting specific, identifiable scenes and characters from the book. They were later included in a 1952 "deluxe" Italian reprint of Mondo piccolo, but to my knowledge they were never included (alas) in any of the English-language collections.

At right is one of these illustrations, which corresponds to the story known in English as "On the Trail." In it, Don Camillo races to catch Peppone, who is armed and headed for a nearby town where he has political enemies, before the hot-headed Mayor can get into trouble. If you look very carefully, halfway down the left edge of the picture you'll see the figure of Peppone, sitting on the side of the road; he has already come to his senses. This drawing is simple, but Guareschi has sneaked in a lot of detail: note the church and the farm in the background, and that little devil observing the proceedings from behind the milestone in the foreground (lower right corner of picture). And those trees, with the spindly arms growing from sawed-off branches, are a common real-life feature of Guareschi's Little World.

And more ...
Yes, of course, there's more! :-) For instance, aspiring artist GG had a brief flirtation with oils, producing several paintings in early 1943 (just before he was returned to military service and almost immediately made a prisoner of Germany).

At left is a detail from one of GG's oil paintings. The subjects are his wife and little son "Albertito," and I'm told that the portrait was done from life (i.e., it was posed for).

And I could go on (but you knew that). :-) For instance, Guareschi was very interested in photography and took hundreds of pictures (in fact, a book of his photos was published in Italy in the past year). Not only that, but wood-carving, drafting, and mixed-media provided still other artistic outlets for Don Camillo's creator.