I read one Zerocalcare book a few months back: Forget My Name, which I thought was his breakthrough or biggest book (or maybe just that in the English language), but found some elements of it hard to parse. It seemed like some of what tripped me up was just the way he tells stories, so I thought I might as well go back to his first book and see what I found there.
This is that book: The Armadillo Prophecy was published in 2011 in the author's native Italy, with this 2023 English-language edition translated by Carla Roncalli di Montorio. One minor point: the first section of this book - about a dozen pages - seems to have been added nine years later (so about 2020) as a later prologue, to connect to the author's later work and revisit some of the themes.
Like Forget, it's structured as a constellation of short sections, circling a cluster of central concerns and ideas without directly telling a single coherent story or turning into a single narrative. Also like Forget, it's entirely from within Zero's mind - there are other characters, but he explicitly calls out that he's drawing them in quirky ways (I'll come back to that) which is also a sneaky way of making clear that he's also writing about them entirely as he sees or understands them.
What I mean is: I don't think Zerocalcare's books are about a wider world. They're all about what it feels like to be Zerocalcare, what is going on in his head, how he feels and thinks about things. Other people exist - he's not some kind of solipsist - but we'll never get their viewpoints, and their concerns will never be on the same scale as Zero's.
In fact, the second most important character - here, and, I think, in his work in general - is that armadillo on the cover, the external manifestation of his internal voice. The movie based on this book describes the armadillo as being Zero's "fears and insecurities," but I think it's wider than that - the armadillo is the eternally questioning internal voice, the kind that can turn into something like a separate persona for people who live mostly in their own heads.
I haven't yet said what Armadillo is "about." There was an event that sparked all of the thoughts here - something from the outside world that sent Zero into this internal cascade. And a more conventional book would be "about" that event, that person, somewhat equally about the two of them.
That's not how Armadillo works; I don't think it's how Zero works in general. To be blunt, Armadillo is a book about someone else's death, entirely about what changes that made in Zero's thinking.
Camille was a teenage friend, part of a group of four that hung out all the time. Zero had a huge crush on her, of course - a book like this can't start from anywhere else. And of course he never told her, or did anything about it. And of course she moved away, and he only saw her rarely after that. And of course she died very young, and tragically - the word "anorexia" is mentioned once, and no other details are ever given.
We don't learn about Camille here. We know the young Zero desperately wanted her, in the ways sixteen-year-olds desperately want things. We see that she was pretty, and always there. We probably remember similar crushes from our own youth, and understand. But Camille is just an image - again, other people aren't important here. She isn't even on most of the pages - not even referenced in a majority of the sections, if I wanted to start counting pages. She's not a person, because Zero never actually had a real relationship with her. If I wanted to be cruel, I'd say Zero never tried to know her as a person: he thought that required dating her, and he couldn't work up the courage to do that, so instead he left her as a mysterious, unknowable Other.
So Camille's death is the moment that sparked this book, but the book is more about Zero being neurotic and, maybe, beginning to realize that and (even more of a maybe) thinking that he might want to be slightly less neurotic and more straightforward in his life.
Autobio comics are often about neurotic young men wrapped up in their own heads. Zero has an energetic line and a quick way with patter-y writing that emphasizes that rush-of-thinking aspect of neurosis - Armadillo is fun to read and deeply entertaining. We know this kind of guy, and Zero presents himself well in that tricky balance: clearly not functioning well in society, but not a complete goofball, either.
That energetic line and visual inventiveness also comes out with a lot of secondary characters - one oft-repeated schtick here is the "in order to preserve his privacy, I'll present Character X as <insert random thing>". Zero's parents are each seen just a couple of times, and treated this way - in forms that I gather continue throughout his work, since they're drawn the same way in Forget, and informed some of the structure of Forget. Here it's mostly a joke, but an important joke - it keeps the circumscribed, Zero-focused nature of the whole project central, since he isn't going to accurately depict other people. Again: not the ways they look and not the ways they think.
I gather from Forget that Zero has become somewhat more outward-focused than he started, which is good - this is awfully insular, awfully wrapped up in the head of one mid-twenties Italian guy, and there's only so much material that can be wrung from one guy's neuroses. (On the other hand, he's already done something like half a dozen GNs, a movie and two animated TV series, so maybe this particular well of neurosis is a cash-cow.)
I like the energy here, I like the self-awareness, I like the strength and vigor of the drawing. I'd like a little more reflection, more of a sense that the rest of the world actually does exist, and that other people have separate, different concerns. But it's a young creator's first project, so all of that is to be expected, and Forget shows that, in a really weird, quirky way, he did start concerning himself with at least his family's history, though he weirdly fictionalized that in ways I'm still not sure how to take.
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