Pulp magazines, which virtually every industrial nation had on their newsstands, were platforms in Italy for what was a curiously sophisticated comics art. Other comics periodicas followed, including Il Giornaletto (1910), Donnina (1914), L’Intrepido (1920), Piccolo mondo (1924), Il Vittorioso, L’Avventuroso (1934), Il Monello (1933), and L’Audace (1937).īut comics were not simply herded into a publishing ghetto. It started in 1908 with the premiere of Il Corriere dei Piccoli this newsprint magazine was the first mainstream journal dedicated to comics. In Italy, fumetti has become synonymous with comic strips, and particularly photo-comics, where written dialogue (in a balloon or not) is superimposed over a photo that was probably shot especially for the comic or, perhaps, a series of stills excerpted from a film.
Fumetti literally means “small puffs of smoke,” which suggests the speech balloons common to most comic strips.