Word: fumetti
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Italy's 15 million fumetti fans-readers of the photographic romance magazines that take their name from the dialogue balloons-usually go for soap-opera plots. But last winter a Milan fumetto entrepreneur, Pino Vignal, scored a modest inaugural success -80,000 copies-with a fumetto magazine based on the Bible...
...Fumetti magazines rarely pursue such Biblical story lines, but from the strap to the toe of Italy's boot they are all the rage. Each week some 4,000,000 Italians, mostly women, pay an estimated $385,000 for the latest copies of Dream, Eternal Passion, Sun in My Eyes, My Woman, Grand Hotel and dozens of other fumetti publications. Fumetti magazines have also proved popular in other Latin countries: the fumetti-like Nous Deux (We Two) has the largest weekly circulation (upwards of 1,700,000) in France...
Launched by a Milanese comic-book publishing house after World War II, the first fumetto magazine, Grand Hotel, was simply a serialized cartoon romance. In 1947 a competitive firm substituted live models, posed them before a camera, and the fumetti art form was fixed...
With a few exceptions like La Bibbia, Italy's fumetti are sentimental soap-opera plots, as pure as they are lathery. Successively framed by the camera, the young lovers march inexorably toward an impassive clinch. Sex, violence and nudity are fumetti taboos, partly in concession to a Roman Catholic women's association, which charged in 1951 that the magazines were corrupting Italian youth. Bosoms are thoroughly draped, although now and then a generously endowed film star, like Marisa Allasio, may present problems...
...Fumetti models are paid an average of $16 to $25 a day, and some of them-Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren, for example-go on to bigger things. Some of them even come back. Such Italian film and television celebrities as Mike Buongiorno, Vittorio Gassmann and Marisa del Frate pose willingly for fumetti scripts, draw as much as $20,000 for a single series-which, shot in weeks, will be doled out to an avid public for months...