Sam Pezzo
Created by Vittorio Giardino

Another fine example of European's love affair with everything American and noir is Vittorio Giardino's bande dessinée private peeper SAM PEZZO (pezzo is Italian for spade--get it?). With a dark mustache, high forehead, a smoke jammed in his yap, and no stranger to hangovers or cynical observations, sam works out of a suitably bleak and unnamed but vaguely European "shitpile of a city." He does collections and other assorted small jobs for various suitably seedy clients. Sam seems to swear quite a bit, but this may be the result of a bad attempt at rendering American tough guy talk into an Italian comic strip, and then translating it into English version I read.

All the usual props are here: the Smith & Wesson .38, the office bottle of Scotch, the trenchcoat, the frosted glass office door, the petty thieves and small-time hustlers who make up most of Sam's world, the babes with lust in their eyes and evil in their hearts, etc., etc.

Maybe it's the spin given on it by being Italian, but what should be a pretty run-of-the-mill read comes off as a lot of fun, even if at times it all seems rather precious.

Sam's adventures first popped up around 1979, in Italian, and have since also appeared in English and French collections, in various black & white and colour configurations. The B&W is especially effective, evoking that whole edgy moody noirthing. Check 'em out!

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