Alessandro Falciola's "Alex Complete"

The author of “Alex Complete” — “complete” as a collection of all the “Alex-stories” published with Passerino Editore — Alessandro Falciola, (with illustrations by Fabrizio Lorenzelli) describes his text as “an experiment, a hybrid between comics with illustrations and written parts”. And again: “with the ebook formula, I can insert new tables or add parts and my publisher can modify all the ebooks on all platforms in 48 hours, something atypical… in motion”.

In fact, if you manage to untangle the spelling mistakes, the too many suspension points, the wrong punctuation, the missing apostrophes, the wrong accents, that no one has bothered to edit, you can deduce a sort of outline, a script for a comic or even a film.

The stories have as protagonists Captain Hassler of the SS and the young Alex Hinder, his faithful follower. The stories, which follow one another in chronological order, are set in a dystopian-despotic time, where Hitler won the war and did not die, only to be replaced by a certain Becker, his successor, and, in the end, even by one of the two main characters, Hassler. The United States, on the other hand, is under Japanese rule.

The entire world is ruled by Nazi-fascist totalitarian regimes that are part of the Reich and — in the wake of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade — the Nazis are on the trail of some holy relics, including a nail from the True Cross that will set the events in motion.

Each story is a small “politically incorrect” delirium, made up of fast, almost lightning-fast plots, very little developed and only for fans of the genre, within which “justice does not enter”.

We move between savannahs, tombs, crypts, convents, mines. The actors are SS and monks, black policemen and spies, shamans and drug dealers, all seasoned with esotericism and massacres, blood, violence and barbaric executions.

Many themes are covered, the struggle between the army and the Gestapo and within the SS themselves, mysticism, the contrast between ideal and reality, the idea that true science is religion.

The style is fragmented and dry, very colloquial. Every now and then some images stand out for a certain not unpleasant decadent languor, for example the figure of the singer in tails in the nightclub.