COCCODRILLI SQUISITI - GRAPHIC NOVEL

Exquisite Crocodiles, the latest work by Ivan Manuppelli aka Hurricane, is not a traditional graphic novel, but a true interactive surrealist work, a surprising graphic and fantastic mechanism, in which the reader, while flipping through the book, becomes the author in first person, building page after page a series of possible surrealist artists, composed of parts of the real protagonists of the movement. Each page is in fact cut into 4 vertical strips: the left pages each host the figure of an artist divided into 4 levels from top to bottom, the right ones his biography, in the same way divided into 4 levels. By turning and variously combining the 4 strips of different biographies, new, fantastic artists are generated, in which the head with Magritte's bowler hat is followed by Breton's bust, Dalì's cane and finally Groucho Marx's shoes, thus giving shape to an imaginary artist, whose surprising biography can be read on the next page. It is the technique that the Surrealists called the exquisite corpse, with which they composed poems, stories and drawings in which one author wrote a verse, another the next one, a third the next one, thus generating collective works that subverted the usual logic, making it explode in a phantasmagoria of inventions. Hurricane builds a perfect device, a clockwork mechanism of surprising inventions, thanks to his ironic, biting and unmistakable style, which captures us in his fantastic network, in which we would never stop playing.