PALEPOLI

Finally arriving in an Italian edition is the visionary, irreverent debut work by Usamaru Furuya, author of the award-winning *Marie no Kanaderu Ongaku*. A cult volume, highly anticipated by all fans of auteur manga. From the pages of the historic avant-garde magazine *Garo*: a surreal, comedic, and transgressive anthology of gags with recurring themes that, starting from the traditional four-panel structure, subvert all the codes and symbols of pop culture, religion, and Japanese and Western art. In the pages of *Palepoli* we find Jesus and the Beatles, the art of Mantegna and the cartoons of Doraemon, the manga of Tezuka and those of Tsuge, Columbo and a killer teddy bear, optical illusions, and black humor... A dizzying graphic tour de force, a festival of parodies and quotations, a theater of the absurd that lays bare the vices, trends, and hypocrisies of our time. Classical myths, religious symbols and Renaissance art, famous icons of pop culture. A triumph of references to manga and anime of every genre, from shojo to gekiga, from detective stories to horror. Everything ends up in the meat grinder of *Palepoli*, the fascinating and irreverent debut work by the Japanese master Usamaru Furuya: a cult book, finally arriving in its first Italian edition. Starting from the traditional structure of the four-panel gag, Furuya subverts every rule to give life to a kaleidoscope of styles, characters, and situations characterized by the darkest and most irreverent humor. Chasing each other through these pages are a killer teddy bear, Jesus, Buddha and the Beatles, Botticelli and Mantegna, Columbo and the killers from *Pulp Fiction*, reinterpretations of Tezuka and erotic parodies of Doraemon. A dizzying graphic tour de force, a theater of the absurd performed to reveal, panel after panel, the hypocrisies and contradictions of Japanese and Western society.