30 Absurdly Funny Comics By Italian Artist Disse

The author has given an exclusive interview for Bored Panda: “My name is Daniele, I’m 30, I have a twin brother, and I live in a small town which is about 50 km from Milan. My stage name is 'Disse,' a nickname friends and schoolmates gave me during my adolescence, which comes from the abbreviation of my last name. I am a qualified expert in the graphic arts and I worked many years as an art director in advertising agencies. Now I’m working with graphics as a freelancer, I also paint and, of course, I design comics.

"They arise from an inner need to reinterpret reality, to look at the world from a different point of view. It is important to me to succeed at producing original ideas, to go further, to experience uncharted territories. The issues of my comics are unrestricted, they deal with sexuality, religion, death, morality. Anyway, I don’t have the aim of expressing my personal opinion, I only explore the absurd. Pop style, although childish and cartoonish, can hide a transgressive, disturbing and provocative soul. The choice not to include dialogue often gives rise to difficulties of interpretation for the comics (some of them need a re-reading), but also gives them a universal visual language."

He's driven by certain inspiration and a sense of the absurd: "I think I’ve always had [the liking for the absurd], it’s one of my characteristics as well as the overthinking. I take inspiration for my comics in the oddest of times and places: when I'm in the bathroom, when I drive, when I'm taking a shower, just before I fall asleep or right after I wake up, also while I'm petting my cat. In order not to forget my intuitions, I quickly transcribe them in a note on my smartphone, ready to be re-elaborated at a later time. I follow with admiration the dark humor works of artists like Remi Lascault, Alex Gamsu Jenkins, Whosji, exotic.cancer."

"My personal key to comedy is to provide viewers with 90% of the information to understand the story, leaving the other 10% to their personal brainpower. A funny guy, with a bald round head, is often the protagonist of my stories, but sometimes animals and cult figures can steal the scene. The format I use is square-shaped, frames are usually four but their number may change. I design my drawings with Adobe Illustrator and thanks to vector graphics, I can print in any size without any loss in image quality.”

The author has given us a little update about how he's been doing in these last few years: "Great satisfaction! I have an audience that has grown and is increasingly fond of my type of humor. I like to be absurd and unexpected, so I rarely publish comics contextualized to current events. For example, I dedicated only one comic to the pandemic, during the lockdown. There are ongoing projects such as exhibitions, previously limited by the pandemic, and soon some news about the world of crypto art."

He's also given a great piece of advice for those who would like to do something like these comics: "It's important to dedicate time to the search for a personal identification style, in order to make them truly recognizable especially on social (where it's easy to fall into monotony). I also advise you to transcribe all the stimuli and absurd situations that the world offers us every day on your telephone, in a sketchbook, whatever you prefer, so that you can develop your ideas later. I find it fundamental to any creative process. Last but not least, you need to practice a lot in freehand drawing, sketches, but also in the use of software such as Adobe Illustrator or Procreate."