In the following article, we will show you an interview with Fabricio Salvatore part 1. He is 24 years old and has created his first graphic novel. In exclusive, he will tell us about his experience in creating it and how to adapt a real story to a graphic novel, it’s not wasted, keep reading, don’t miss it!
Watch the best moments and experiences in this interview with Fabricio Salvatore.
Welcome dear reader! Today we are pleased to interview exclusively for TFC, Fabricio Salvatore (@fabricioposting). With 24 years old, he has just published his first graphic novel, adapting the famous story of Kaspar Hauser.
He will tell us, in addition to many other things, about his experience when facing the development of such a long comic book. Talking about the responsibility that comes with working from real facts, and how much you can modify them. Make yourself comfortable and let’s get started!
When did you start drawing and making comics?
Like almost all cartoonists, since I had the motor skills to hold a pencil in my hand. I think I’m very much in favor of the idea that all artists, in reality, are people who didn’t give it much importance when they were kids, and that they sublimated it in drawing a lot.
You have to have some minimum disorder to be a draftsman.
Then, years later, I entered the Faculty of Arts, with the idea of being a classical artist and I quickly became disenchanted with that.
I leaned more towards comics, because it seemed to me a more popular and easier way to transmit a message. Comic strips reach people more than anything in a museum, with all due respect to museums and art with a capital letter.
If I have a message to give, I think comics are the best medium to do it.
Tell us a little bit about your new graphic novel.
My latest graphic novel, Kaspar Hauser, is about a true case commonly known as “the Kaspar Hauser enigma”. This is the story of a 17-year-old boy in 1828 in Nuremberg, who lived until that age locked inside a cellar.
From one day to the next he is released, and goes out into the world without knowing anything about anything. He then carries out a biological, semiotic, linguistic, and psychological exploration, confronting him with the many problems that this entails.
How is the process of adapting a true story into a graphic novel?
I would say that I was respectful of the documentation. My main visual source was Herzog’s film, which has the same name.
When I watched it, I paid a lot of attention to the clothes, the shots, and the interiors, above all.
I tried to be super respectful because it was a real story I was telling.
When you’re reading any comic book, there’s always an implicit contract, and that contract can be “all this you’re consuming is true and it’s real”.
This happens in Kaspar Hauser, or in the comic Dora, by Minaverry, which obviously has its elements of invention, but when you read it, you are seeing that the clothes, and the architecture, are selling you a certain climate of realism.
There are much more loose, free and adventurous projects, like He-man, which looks like a certain medieval past, but the armor and weapons are pure inventiveness and fun.
No He-Man reader is going to tell you “In Grayskull in 1700 they didn’t use that kind of armor or that kind of sword”. With Kaspar I consider I have a much more realistic project.
Dora, from Minaverry, takes place in Nuremberg in 1960. So it was also an inspiration to see how the author takes the same city, but in a different way.
He himself had the option of looking at real photos of the streets of Nuremberg and aging them. He would take out everything that said “this doesn’t belong to this era” and use that image as a reference.
(Fabricio takes a swig of beer)
And in this sense… How much fiction and how much reality is there in your story?
In the story I tried to be as respectful as possible, for ethical reasons, because it is a real and very tragic case, although there is no family member who can come to claim anything from me. I tried to make all my mediation more plastic or aesthetic, rather than ideological.
The liberty I take is very brief. It is two pages long and very obvious, that is to say, there is only one very metaphysical moment in the story, where you can see that this could not have been so.
Then, that moment stops and the story moves on. It is a moment where a Zarathustra-like character appears, who develops a moral.
That moral is my take on the story, and then it continues. That could be considered a manipulation, because ultimately I’m taking that line down.
Beyond that, in terms of the events and how I tell them, I’m as faithful as possible to the sources.
In one comic I’m working on now, it’s still very green, the story is completely made up. It’s a medieval fantasy comic and while there are no country names, no geographical names or locations I use a lot of documentation of real armor.
In this way, it changes the project, because it’s a fantasy world where there are monsters, people with animal heads, and a lot of metaphor.
I, for example, don’t like the aesthetics of Warcraft. In Warcraft there may be an orc, but with a giant shoulder pad that doesn’t refer to any real armor.
However, in the comic I’m starting to put together, there are ogres, there are orcs, there’s everything you can imagine from that world, but they use a 15th century Italian armor with the ornamentation of that time.
So the project changed. The visual contract is “this is realistic.” The story project is “well, anything can happen here”.
I find it more interesting.
So much for this first part of the interview, read on for the second part and discover Fabricio’s secrets when it comes to his work, what materials he uses, the comics he has to recommend, among many other things!
Conclusion
Fabricio tells us in detail about his beginnings, the difficulty of adapting a real story to a graphic novel, and if he mixes fiction with reality, among other very important things.
His experience will be very helpful on your way to creating a graphic novel adapted to a real story.
