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ister No's customers are always introduced as harmless tourists
or travelers inspired by curiosity. They are often |
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Europeans or Americans eager to spend an unusual holiday and taste the thrill of
adventure. Sometimes they are persons who venture into the so-called "Green Hell"
in connection with their work: dam or highway engineers, missionaries who bring
the Gospel to the Indios, explorers who want to fill in the last empty spaces left
in geographical maps. At other times they may be naturalists, anthropologists,
archaeologists or scientists of any kind who hope to investigate the mysteries
and marvels of the Amazon forest. But these customers almost always turn out to
be different from their benign appearance, and they eventually reveal their true
- and extremely dangerous - intentions: the flighty young girl gives the
impression of being a tourist, but she's actually tracking down her father who
disappeared in the forest many years earlier; the false anthropologist actually
wants to remove the Indios from an area rich in gold ore, the
apparently inoffensive scientist is actually a dangerous criminal on the run,
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and so on. Mister No is always involved in a number of extremely risky
adventures against his will and every time he is compelled to demonstrate his
valor as a former soldier.
The dense Amazon rain forest is the main scenario of Mister No's stories.
The luxuriant and wild natural environment is reproduced with painstaking
documentary exactness by the illustrators; it is not a "papier-mâché" jungle
like that appearing in many of the comics strips or Hollywood movies made in the
Fifties, but rather a real concrete place, with "real plants" and animals, so
that readers can genuinely experience the dangers and marvels of one of
the most fascinating areas of our planet.
The various tribes of Indios living in the forest almost like "savages" -
in the Fifties they were much less "civilized" than today - are presented and
depicted with extreme anthropological precision. Mister No is a friend of the
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Indios and has even spent a period of his life with the Yanoama tribe, where he
married a young Indio woman. Amazonia and its inhabitants are constantly threatened
by the advance of "civilized" men who build dams and highways, hunt for gold and
diamonds, live as cattle breeders and timber traders, and constantly endanger the
fragile ecosystem of the area through their greed for money. The clash between civilization |
| and nature is the main theme of this "modern western".
Mister No often defends nature and the native populations of the Amazon forest, but
he's not an ecologist on principle: he understands the reasons driving a poor country
like Brazil to exploit the immense resources of Amazonia, but he also fights
against the cynical and cruel methods adopted by those who use violence to accumulate
wealth. Mister No is a great traveler. With his Piper he has reached virtually
every place in Brazil - from Rio de Janeiro to Salvador de Bahia, from the Sertão
to the Pantanal, from the Iguazú Falls to the rising metropolis of Brasilia
- and all the countries of the entire South American continent
(Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina). |
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He has even traveled all the way from Mexico right down to the Tierra del Fuego,
and from the Caribbean to Easter Island. With larger planes than his tourism
Piper, and sometimes in other periods of his life, he also visited Burma and the
Sunda Islands, Spain and Italy, icy Antarctica and the torrid African continent.
Africa, in particular, has been the theatre of a long series of adventures, with a
journey from the Ivory Coast up to Egypt, passing through Congo, the Kalahari, South
Africa, Kenya, the Sahara desert and many other places. Asia and Europe have
essentially formed the background of his war experiences, while North America is
the country where Mister No started out, to which he often returns. All the places
he visits are described with a documentary rigor that constitutes the distinctive
feature of this series. In many cases the scriptwriters and creators of the artwork
have visited these places personally, so that the documentation provided by books
and magazines is integrated with their personal memories.
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MY NAME IS MISTER NO |
A former combatant in Spain, Burma, the Pacific area
and Italy, he now accompanies tourists into the skies of his
new homeland: Amazonia! |
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