n September 1998, Tex Willer will be 50 years old. This character, halfway between a cowboy and a righteous gunfighter, is Italy's most beloved western hero. He has outlived his graphic creator, several different formats and editions, narrative experiments, and all the serializations of western comics serials born before, with, and immediately after him. To go back over his origins and career again is like jumping on an old wagon and rediscovering a mythical America, a fictitious, stolen, and manipulated object of desire situated in the land of Italians' collective imagery between nostalgia and eternal boyhood.
Giovanni Luigi Bonelli and Aurelio Galleppini
It was September 1948. The age of fascism and war had just died away and in Italy people woke up from that long nightmare with a desire for reconstruction and a longing for America. After years of an ideology that regarded "America" as an evil temptation towards freedom and democracy, Italians could go back to an American dream the way this was embodied in movies, books, comics and heroes. Tarzan had eluded the fascist censure by hiding under the costume and name of the German "Sigfrido" and people stared at their freedom as at a never ending prairie. Perhaps Europe looked a little like the West with all there was to build and recreate, but here the scenario was somehow depressing, there it was astonishing. Peering out of the ruins of Europe, people could go back to the images that the war had swept away, that of an almost untouched land, which was being transformed quickly through the bad and good energy of free men. Like the men of the Old West, Italians felt they had to reinvent entities as well as identities. It was a time in which what counted the most was each man's creativity. For once, Italy didn't look like an old society forced into a stratified and fixed order, but rather like a place where people could change themselves and change their society as well. Another reason for the western's appeal in postwar Italy may well have been that the ideal American revealed intolerance towards constrictions and authority, a sentiment that post-fascist Italy certainly shared.
Giovanni Luigi Bonelli, one of the leaders of the western revival in Italy, says that by creating Tex Willer he gave form to people's ideal hero: "People hate the arrogant military, the powerful man, the banker. People hate power, or as we say nowadays, 'il palazzo[.]' We are all anarchist, rebel, bothered by thousands of problems" ["Conversazione con Bonelli"]. And to further free his audience from the memory of the fascist cultural "heaviness", Bonelli avoided the long descriptions of Zane Grey and gave to his stories "rhythm, action and dialogue" typical of the narrative tradition of adventure. ["Conversazione con Bonelli"].
In a little apartment on the via Saffi, Milan, Tea Bonelli had organized his little publishing house specializing in comic books. She shared the apartment with his son Sergio, and Aurelio Galleppini, a graphic artist. G.L. Bonelli, who had started writing novels and scripts for comics in the 30's, was one of the first Italian editors to go back to comics after the war. As early as 1946 he was publishing the magazine Cowboys with editor Fernando De Leo ["Spaghetti Wilderness"], and two years later, was already releasing the western strips I Tre Bill, Yuma Kid, Hondo, and Rio Kid. In September (1948) he sent out to the newspaper kiosks of Italy the first issue of a new western comic which was destined to become a cult classic, probably the most long-lived western comic of all time.
The first issue of the "Collana del Tex" ("Tex collection") was titled "Il Totem misterioso" ("The mysterious Totem"); its cover presented the image of Tex, a cowboy, on a reared up horse, and three bandit-like men sheltered behind some rocks, holding guns in their hands and fear in their faces. Tex was regarded as a B comic by its creators who directed their best efforts towards Occhio Cupo (Dark eye) which featured a hero of the North America in the 1700's. Galep would illustrate this comic during the day and reserve the nights for Tex, but the results were quite different from Bonelli and Galleppini's expectations ["Conversazione con Galleppini"].
