Tiziano Sclavi

Tiziano Sclavi (born 3 April 1953) is an Italian comic book author, journalist and writer of several novels.

Tiziano Sclavi was born in Broni (Pavia) on 3 April 1953, his mother was a teacher and his father was a communal secretary.

He had lived his childhood and first youth in the Province of Pavia, mainly in Stradella, Canneto Pavese and Certosa di Pavia.

Due to the job of the father, Sclavi had moved from a town to another:

"I had grown up in a little town where everyone stopped to see a car when it was moving into the street, because nothing had ever happened. I'd lived in a little town until I was fourteen years old [...] when cars passed they stopped! People stopped and all younglings saw cars: the “1100s”, that is, an 1100 was passing by [...]! And then it scares me, that repetition too, that... I don't know, my father was an employee, he was a communal secretary... Bureaucracy also scares me, repetition of things scares me, the boredom, the non-sense, then actually there are much more stuffs! Ignorances scares me more than the unknown! But, ok, this have been said by others a lot of time ago before me, much better!"

Sclavi has been a passionate reader since childhood: he claims he read the entire production of Edgar Allan Poe when he was between six and seven years old, and he has liked scary stories since his childhood, developing a passion of horror and science fiction films.

He started to write when he was still too young pushed by the desire to imitate what he enjoyed.

He declared:

"I liked western films and I wrote a western 'novel' when I was in the second year of middle school. Then I was a fanatic of 007, I'd read all the works of Fleming and I wanted more of them, so I wrote one on my own."

At middle school, he won a writing competition with a series entitled Storie Storte ("Crooked Stories").

Then, he attended the liceo classico of Pavia, when he published a story entitled Lettere bianche ("White Letters") on a school journal with the help of his Italian literature professor who believed into the ability and creativity of Sclavi.

After high school, Sclavi attended university at the faculty of modern literature, but dropped out after a few exams.

Later, he had moved to Milan.

In 1971, thanks to the interest of Grazia Nidasio who presented him to Mino Milani, Sclavi began to collaborate with the Messaggero dei Ragazzi, where he wrote articles and stories often under the pseudonym "Francesco Argento", in honour to Francesco Guccini and Dario Argento, who both would be his colleagues at Corriere dei Piccoli.

In 1972, Sclavi met Raffaele Crovi, who would be initially his literary agent and then editor of his novels and stories.

In 1973, Sclavi issued a series of crime stories on Il Corriere dei Ragazzi under the pseudonym of Francesco Argento.

The stories he wrote for Corriere dei Piccoli were collected in the volume I misteri di Mystère ("Mystère's Mysteries") by Editore Bietti in 1974 (then published by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore).

In 1974, Sclavi published his first short novel, Film, where he tries to unite the horror splatter and the grotesque.

It was issued by Il Formichiere and it won the 1974 Scanno Prize for storytelling.

However, Film seems to be a work "which can not be easily collocated in a genre or a novel movement, and it is even [...] difficult to limit it in the category itself of the novel".

In the same year, he joined the redaction of Corriere dei Ragazzi as editor of the column Sottosopra and here he met Alfredo Castelli, with whom he collaborated as Ghost Writer for the comic series Gli Aristocratici ("The Aristocrats"), writing the screenplay of some episodes and later creating his own characters like Altai & Jonson drawn by Giorgio Cavazzano.

As Francesco Argento, Sclavi published in 1975 a crime novel entitled Un sogno di sangue ("A dream of blood").

During the same period, he wrote also Tre ("Three") and Mostri ("Monsters"), published ten years later despite Natalia Ginzburg had already noticed him to the Giulio Einaudi Editore.

In 1976, he began his professional career as journalist.

When Corriere dei Ragazzi was closed in 1977, Sclavi began to collaborate with Il Corriere dei Piccoli, writing comic series like Allister, Miki, Fantòm alongside Sam Peck, Johnny Bassotto ("Dachshund Johnny"), Il Cavallino Michele ("Michele the Little Horse"), La guerra nell'aria ("The War in the Air") and Le pagine della Befana ("Befana's pages").

He published on Messaggero dei Ragazzi the western series Silas Finn, drawn by Cavazzano, which would be later issued also in West Germany; he published Devoluzione ("De-evolution") for Alter and he wrote Steve Vandam for the RAI programme SuperGulp!.

In 1978, Sclavi published the first version of Apocalisse, formerly entitled Guerre terrestri ("Terrestrial Wars"), issued by Rusconi.

When Corriere della Sera was acquired by Rizzoli Editore, Sclavi proposed himself to Bonelli as editor and he was hired in 1981 as proofreader and writer of series like Zagor, Mister No and Ken Parker, creating also his own characters.

Among his first works, he had written screenplays for Ken Parker (the issue #35 Il sentiero dei giganti and #41 Alcune signore di piccola virtù, both based on scripts by Giancarlo Berardi) and then Sclavi had replaced Guido Nolitta for Zagor.

These stories are focused on the character of Jacques Mystère, whose name inspired the creation of Martin Mystère by Alfredo Castelli in 1982.

Since 1982, he had written also screenplays for Mister No, with a little contamination of the horror genre.

Sclavi is most famous as creator of the comic book Dylan Dog in 1986, for Italian publishing house Sergio Bonelli Editore.

More than 300 issues have appeared in the series, which has sold millions of copies.

It has been in collaboration with several artists, including Claudio Villa, Corrado Roi, Gustavo Trigo, Carlo Ambrosini, Luigi Piccatto, Angelo Stano, Mike Mignola, Andrea Venturi, Giampiero Casertano and Bruno Brindisi.

The positive response of first issues of Sclavi convinced the publishing house to give him the role of screenwriter for the important issue #200 of the series, becoming then its editor and writing its stories until 1988.

Sclavi returned to write for Zagor on the 1990 special spin-off dedicated to Cico, the Mexican sidekick of Zagor, entitled Horror Cico.

In the preface of the 2001 new edition of the first series of Sclavi, Castelli writes:

"I met Tiziano Sclavi at the beginning of the seventies, when he was very young and began to take part to comic art exhibitions… His skills were amazing."

At the same time, he worked at the national broadcaster RAI thanks to the mediation of Crovi and, together with Bianca Pitzorno, he wrote texts of the show Gioco-città.

He collaborated with other newspapers belonging to the Corriere della sera group and with the journal Amica (where he edited a humour column) and with Salve (where he wrote as film critic).