Rotto

Joe Rotto: the Italian bad one

Wearing a raincoat or a smoking but always elegant, cigarette in hand, lithe gait, his face like a mask and teeth in sight like a shark.
“If you are really not able to be better, at least dress better”: this is his admonition, knowing that we are mostly not able to be better than we are he invites us to be at least more stylish.
Joe Rotto (‘Rotto’ means ‘broken’) is the amazing creature born from the pencil of Luca Buoncristiano, who says: “It was he who created me, not the contrary.”
Luca was not born as illustrator: his first passion was the word, the writing. Until one day Joe Rotto took shape among his notes, and required attention, pages and a stage.
He comes out of nowhere but it’s like a millenary presence that acts like a catalyst of the worst impulses of evil, a black hole into which fall the baseness of the broken world in which we live.
We do not have too many biographical or physiognomic elements about him: Joe is not a man, but all men.
He can shake our consciences making us oscillate between entertainment and annoyance, because he tells us that evil is the best way to succeed: he uses it to his advantage, and gives us some unpleasant lessons of what humans are capable of.
He surrounds himself with beautiful beings as Sid (the pissing dog that, raising his paw, downplays and moderate), Sado-Babies (because the world of childhood is – unintentionally – the cruelest that exists), and a crowd of cynical anthropomorphic animals .
After “Mary e Joe”, the book written with Amitrano Alessandra and published by Fazi, Luca Buoncristiano is now finishing a book of his own which he calls “a hybrid, halfway between graphic novel and novel”: a new juice of human aberrations through which Joe Rotto moves with his usual aplomb and skill.
“I am inspired often by stories that actually happen: to tell the evil of men fantasy is not needed” says the author, who is now looking for a publisher ready to give way to a completely new character in the Italian and international scene, and to all his bestiary.
Joe Rotto has a lot of admirers and fans to his evil snob style, sophisticated language and design inspired by ’900famous illustrators as Charles Addams and Edward Gorey, and everyone is waiting anxiously to see the world again through the lucidity of a shark’s mouth.