Martín Vitaliti, 360°
 (AL Series n.1)

“We could define this book as a “concept-comic”. It is based on a single page of La Banda del Missouri (The Missouri gang), designed by the acclaimed Italian Hugo Pratt (published in Tótem Extra 20. Especial Western(Totem Extra 20. Western special), Madrid: Publisher Nueva Frontera, 1978, p. 91). Its grid of three cartoons has been reproduced forty-one times, while Vitaliti has developed the respective illustrations, which results in thirteen panoramic views of each scene of the book.

“The narrative as such, the discovery by some Indians and guards of a riderless horse and a body floating in the Missouri river, has no special meaning; what it does have is the emptiness of a great landscape developed by Vitaliti’s intervention. This landscape evokes a kind of “something inbetween”, creating on one hand a cinematographic, visual effect, and on the other an illustrated script that could be said to be frozen.

“Certainly, compared with other well known representations of landscapes, and we think for example of Panorama of San Francisco from California Street Hill (1877) by Eadweard Muybridge, or Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) by Ed Ruscha, Vitaliti’s focus looks very complex. What might appear at first sight as a popular book of comics has been transformed into a cadavre exquis: a story that already exists retold by somebody else, which does not lead to a climax but fixes it as if it had been detained.” (Moritz Küng).