Furio

Created in the wake of the success of Dick Fulmine, Furio Almirante - a boxer with an iron fist, ugly but appealing, endowed with a great mane of wavy hair - turned out to be an extremely effective character, and proved to be a veritable corner-stone for Tea Bonelli's Edizioni Audace, helping to overcome the complications and obstacles springing from the war. Set in an exotic framework (for instance, the whole of the first part is set in a South American background), the stories of this hero and his inseparable assistant, the gorilla Serafino, featured a wide range of subjects and became immensely popular, and were much loved by a great variety of readers. Furio was soon hailed as the prototype of the righter of wrongs, one who would not gladly suffer those with overweening power and cunning or tinpot tyrants, a figure who preferred to take the law into his own hands (and to do so on behalf of the weak), in a world where scheming and plotting and power politics are constantly making a mockery of justice. This philosophy allowed Furio to gain enormous favor among his readers, and his popularity remained unabated even with the numerous changes of illustrators (Carlo Cossio at the beginning, Vittorio Cossio immediately afterwards and then, in the postwar period, Dino Attanasio and Lina Buffolente) or the transformations in book size and costumes (at a certain point, to adapt to the prevailing taste of the period Furio began to wear a mask which, in actual fact, hardly masked him at all). But it was above all in the postwar period that G. L. Bonelli, by now completely in command of the medium of expression, bestowed on the character the special psychological characteristics which, further refined, would in later years lead to the long-lasting success of Tex. In the Sixties, however, when Furio was reproposed in small book format and refreshed by the appealing artwork of Franco Bignotti, the character (by now irremediably dated in certain aspects) met with only a lukewarm reception.