Cartoon Digital faces: Igort #CartoonDigital

PODCAST | Nicolò Comotti interviews illustrator and editor Igort.

Igort (born Igor Tuveri; 1958 in Cagliari, Sardinia) is an Italian comics artist and illustrator. He began his career in Bologna at the end of the seventies, collaborating with numerous magazines: including Linus, Alter, Frigidaire, Métal Hurlant, L’Écho des savanes, Vanity, The Face. Since the nineties, he collaborates with the Japanese publishing houses Kodansha, Brutus and Hon Hon do. In 1983 he founded together with others the Valvoline group, a collective of avant-garde art that produces a monthly supplement published in the magazine Alter Alter. Valvoline’s activity extends to other fields, such as design, painting, fashion and music. In 1994 he exhibited his works at the Venice Biennale and in 2000 he founded the Coconino Press publishing house. In 2002 he published “5 is the Perfect Number”, a Neapolitan noir. The book was released simultaneously in 6 countries and won the book of the year award at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Fats Waller followed, an imaginative biography of one of the most popular Jazz musicians of the Thirties. He moved to Paris and began the Baobab series, which was released in Italy, France, Spain, Holland, Germany and the United States. In 2010, after a long residence, between Ukraine, Russia and Siberia, Igort wrote and drew Ukrainian Notebooks, published in the Strade Blu series of Mondadori. In 2011 he published Russian Notebooks, drawn following a report by the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaja. In 2013 he starred in the documentary “Igort, the Secret Landscape”, by director Domenico Distilo. In the last half of 2014, Igort announced the publication of his Japanese notebooks, a memoir, comic essay, travel book and drawn reportage that tells the author’s years spent in Japan. In November 2016, the novel “My Generation” came out, which explores the Punk and New Wave era. In the same month he released “Assaults to the Bakeries”, a volume written by Haruki Murakami that Igort illustrated with watercolors. In 2017 he founded Oblomov Edizioni. In February 2018 Igort was appointed editorial director of Linus. In July 2018 a new documentary on Igort’s work was released in Japan also directed by Domenico Distilo, entitled “Manga Do”. The summer of the same year Igort started the shooting “5 is the Perfect Number”, a film starring Toni Servillo, Valeria Golino and Carlo Buccirosso, taken from his own best seller.

This interview was recorded during the Cartoon Digital Festival 2019, in partnership with the Sardinia Film Commission, thanks to the Italian Film Commissions Association and with the support of the Italian Trade Agency.