Andrea Pazienza, the comic artist who carpeted Italy’s lost generation

“Andrea Pazienza, 26, from San Benedetto, likes to describe himself as being from the Gargano. He lives in Bologna, where he studies at DAMS. 1.86 metres tall. Contributor to Alter, Linus, Frigidaire and Corto Maltese. He created Pentothal and Zanardi. He loves drawings of Pertini.” So begins On Paper They Are All Heroes, the 1984 special dedicated to Andrea Pazienza and now released for the first time on RaiPlay. It opens with a biographical note that has all the feel of a mug shot, taken by the person who knew him best, since Pazienza wrote it himself. A few lines that, almost like a quick felt-tip sketch, are enough to outline what would make Pazienza — or Paz, as everyone called him — a decisive figure in the history of Italian comics and visual culture.

Born in San Benedetto del Tronto in 1956 and raised between the Marche region and the Gargano, Pazienza arrived in Bologna in the mid-1970s to study at DAMS. It was the city of the 1977 Movement, free radio stations, occupations, and a cultural scene where comics, art, music, theatre, and politics constantly intersected. There, he began publishing in the magazines that were changing the language of Italian comics, from Alter Alter to Cannibale and Frigidaire.

The first character to make him famous was Pentothal, protagonist of The Extraordinary Adventures of Pentothal, published from 1977 onward. A student, a dreamer, often paralysed by doubt, Pentothal moves through a Bologna shaped by politics and everyday life: shared apartments, romantic relationships, sleepless nights, demonstrations, the university. Through him, Pazienza captured the atmosphere and contradictions he himself was experiencing at the time.

If Pentothal captures the late 1970s, Zanardi became the emblematic character of the following decade. First appearing in the pages of Frigidaire in 1981, he is a blond, intelligent and ruthless high-school student who, together with his friends Colasanti and Petrilli, moves through stories of manipulation, violence, drugs and total lack of scruples. Zanardi does not represent a generation in the strict sense. Rather, he intercepts and exaggerates some of its darker traits: the decline of major political affiliations, cynicism, individualism and the loss of any collective illusion.

But what distinguishes Paz above all is his drawing. His pages absorb a wide range of references: American underground comics, painting, caricature, popular comics, editorial illustration. The line changes according to the story. It can move from realism to grotesque distortion, from watercolour to a quick sketch, from carefully built composition to a page that looks almost improvised. Through this expressive force and remarkable technical flexibility, Pazienza expanded the possibilities of Italian comics and helped open a season of intense experimentation.

In the 1980s, he worked nonstop. He designed covers, posters and illustrations, and collaborated with some of the most important magazines on the Italian cultural scene. Among his recurring subjects was Sandro Pertini, whom Pazienza admired and transformed into a figure at once political, affectionate and popular. In 1987, Pazienza published Pompeo, his darkest and most personal work. The story of a man grappling with heroin, isolation and self-destruction, it is a harsh tale, far from the lightness and irony of many of his earlier works, and would become one of the most important Italian comics of the twentieth century.

Andrea Pazienza died in 1988, at just thirty-two, but his influence did not end there. It has passed from generation to generation and soon moved beyond the boundaries of comics. It can still be seen today in the work of illustrators, graphic designers, artists and authors who continue to measure themselves against his line. Also bringing Pazienza back into focus is Rome’s MAXXI, which from April 24 to September 27, 2026 is dedicating the exhibition Andrea Pazienza. Non sempre si muore to him, curated by Giulia Ferracci and Oscar Glioti. It is the second chapter of a larger exhibition project devoted to the artist, organized on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of his birth. The exhibition presents Paz as an artist especially sensitive to the spirit of his time, able to capture and narrate a turning point in Italian history: the passage between the end of the great collective utopias and the disenchantment of the 1980s, between occupations and retreat, widespread creativity and self-destruction. Students, makeshift editorial offices, shared apartments, free radio stations, politics and pop culture: whether or not you lived through that moment, it feels enough to close your eyes to see it flow by once again, perhaps with Paz’s quick, nervous line.