Netflix, for some time now, seems to have decided that betting on creativity and authors is a thing of the past. All its new series are the same, with a measured risk, created more by a regulatory committee than by a truly passionate person. The times of Love, Glow, Master of None, or I think you should leave are behind us, buried among true crimes, romance series, and clones that work well as background for the less demanding audience, but have created the paradigm of the “Netflix series.” Fortunately, we will always have Zerocalcare.
This Netflix won’t make me a bad person
Zerocalcare, probably the most popular Italian comic book author of the decade, has created a good handful of graphic novels since the success of La profecía del armadillo in 2011. He is also one of the few remaining voices on Netflix with authorial power. He was behind the fabulous Cut Here and This World Won’t Make Me a Bad Person, and now, three years after that, he presents his new marvel: For Four Pennies. And he has once again left me speechless.
If in his first series he talked (among many other things) about youthful regret and aging, and in the second he raised urban guerrilla and revolution as the only way to move forward, in this third occasion he dedicates himself to discussing the monetary problems of the middle class, gender violence, and accepting your friends in their maturation process. Although these sound like very serious topics, in reality Zero does it with fast, stressful, intelligent comedy, full of winks and references, exquisitely animated by a team that is referenced several times throughout the series.
Zerocalcare is a millennial chronicler as tired by day-to-day life as any of us, a punk who neither drinks, smokes, nor does drugs, but does fight for social justice: he is the only one of his friends who has really done well, and his job is to help them, tell their story, lend a hand without forgetting his roots. It is easier to empathize with a middle-aged man who has been able to pay off his mortgage than with the rich who usually appear on television, in mansions and riding on private yachts. For a few bucks, he shows that the most interesting lives are those that happen between streets, traffic lights, cars, friendships, bars, and shared spaces.
As Zero has shown throughout his comics, he knows how to make you laugh and cry in equal measure: while it’s easy to burst out laughing at some of his complaints about society, it’s inevitable that in the end, he leaves your heart in a knot… Even though we are prepared after the devastating ending of Cut Along the Dotted Line, which marked a turning point in Netflix animated series and proved that there was life beyond BoJack Horseman.
If you’ve ever seen one of his series in the catalog and decided to skip it thinking it would be typical, boring, or strange, this is your sign to start watching Cut to the Line and finish With Four Bitches. Zerocalcare is Italian, but also global, one of the best storytellers of current streaming and that voice of conscience that is worth revisiting from time to time. And if you give him a chance, I assure you that you will adore him, because, among all, we will not let this world turn us into bad people.