'Ippo'.
Stefano Frassetto is an Italian cartoonist, illustrator and journalist. Active since the 1990s for magazines and newspapers in Italy and abroad, he is best-known for his portraits of people active in the cultural scene. As a cartoonist, he was present in Il Giornalino with 'Ippo' (2005-2014), a topical strip about bullying and (not) fitting in, and in the Swiss newspaper 20 Minuti with a current events strip about two students, '35MQ' (2012-2023).
Early life and influences
Stefano Frassetto was born in 1968 in the Italian city of Turin. The only other artist in his family was his great-uncle, who was a landscape painter, working with oils. As a child, young Stefano sometimes painted pictures with him, but in the end he preferred drawing over painting. An avid comic reader since early childhood, Frassetto's true passion for comics started with the annual school diaries built around Charles Schulz's 'Peanuts' strips. While he later also read classic authors like Hugo Pratt and Milton Caniff, Frassetto always kept a preference for humor comics. Over the years, his other favorites have become Garry Trudeau's 'Doonesbury', Bill Watterson's 'Calvin and Hobbes' and Berke Breathed's 'Bloom County'. Graphically, he ranks the fluid and expressive cartooning style of Dik Browne as his major influence.
Frassetto attended scientific high school and then the Polytechnic of Turin, where he graduated from the faculty of architecture with a thesis on architectural drawing in comics, from 'Yellow Kid' to the present day.
Portrait of Keith Haring, by Stefano Frassetto.
Professional career
In the mid-1990s, Frassetto debuted as cartoonist and illustrator in the weekly magazine Il Nostro Tempo. Over the years, he has worked for a variety of Italian and international magazines, with his portraits for instance appearing in La Stampa (Italy), Libération (France) and Le Temps (Switzerland). Making his portraits neither realistic nor caricatured, Frassetto tries to search for a few essential signs in the physiognomy of the face, which he composes mostly with geometric lines. Having made thousands of these portraits, he has mostly captured writers and other people from the world of culture. Before focusing on cartooning and illustration fulltime, Frassetto has also worked as a journalist/columnist for newspapers, dealing mainly with society and television. In addition, Stefano Frassetto is a designer of wine labels for wineries in Italy and France.
Cover illustrations for Il Giornalino.
Ippo
In 2005, Frassetto created his first big comic series for the youth magazine Il Giornalino, 'Ippo' (2005-2014). The title hero is a clumsy child of about 9-10 years old with big glasses, who tries in every way to fit in with the other kids. However, he always fails, because the neighborhood children are mostly bullies. Ippo's only friend is Rufus, who goes around with a helmet on his head because he has an overprotective mother. Since Rufus is distracted and living in his own world, the dialogues between the two boys often become surreal. Frassetto has explained that "one of the main themes in the strip is the malice that the so-called strong exert on the so-called weak, or how the most cynical people rage against the more sensitive ones, without worrying in the slightest about their feelings." Running in Il Giornalino for nine years, Ippo quickly became one of the magazine's most popular characters. Starting in 2019, the 'Ippo' strips have appeared every year in the Comix school diaries published by Franco Cosimo Panini Editore.
'Ippo'.
35MQ
For the Swiss newspaper 20 Minuti, Frassetto created over 2,700 episodes of the comic strip '35MQ' (2012-2023), about two university-aged friends sharing an apartment in a run-down accommodation in the big city. The two protagonists have diametrically opposite characters and backgrounds. Edoardo (Edo) comes from a good family and only has a few remaining exams before he can graduate. Pedro, on the other hand, comes from a more particular family, having a delinquent father and stripper mother. Unlike his roommate, Pedro does not work, except for making some appearances on reality TV shows. Besides Edo and Pedro, the strip has about forty recurring characters, all with their own particularities, including influencers, serial killers, psychopathic neighbors, leaders of religious sects and billionaire emirs. Topically, Frassetto often linked his strip with current events and the changes in society.
'35MQ'.
A first anthology collecting the first ten years of the '35MQ' comic was self-published in 2022 with an introduction by the legendary Italian cartoonist Silver. A second volume was released in the following year.
Other comic strips
In 2007, Frassetto also wrote the graphic novel 'Gate 22', drawn by Pierpaolo Rovero and published by Pavesio Editore. In the summer of 2023, Stefano Frassetto had a column in the Swiss newspaper Le Temps, called 'Les Chefs d'Ooeuvre de la Littérature pour faire Simple'. Every week, he gave a humorous comic strip reinterpretation of an important novel from modern literature.
Cover of the second collection of '35MQ' comic strips (2023), a tribute to the famous painting 'Nighthawks' by the American realist Edward Hopper.