“Humor in Comics” Award 2025

“Humor in Comics” Award 2025 to ReNoir Comics for the Don Camillo series

The Don Camillo comic series was born in 2010 based on an idea by Giovanni Ferrario, art director of ReNoir Comics, with the consultation of Mario Palmaro, writer, professor, and Guareschi expert. It’s a comic adaptation of the Don Camillo stories that aims to be as faithful as possible to the author’s original vision, giving new visibility to those stories that cinema did not take into consideration. Giovannino Guareschi’s heirs provided their father’s documentation and notes and supervised the creation of the comics. Screenwriter Davide Barzi and illustrators Sergio Gerasi, Elena Pianta, Ennio Bufi, and Werner Maresta developed the project for the series and character studies, trying not to be influenced by the film versions but going back to Guareschi’s direct inspirations: Don Camillo therefore does not have Fernandel’s face, and Peppone does not resemble Gino Cervi but Guareschi himself, who initially had proposed himself for the role in Julien Duvivier’s film. Similarly, the “Small World” is not Brescello, the location of the films, but a mixture of landscapes, villages, and buildings from the area between Parma and Piacenza, the same ones Guareschi had in mind while writing his stories. The comic authors based their work on notes preserved in his archive and on personal site visits to capture that corner of Italy from seventy years ago in their drawings.