Wonderful large-format, hardcover 1988 edition of Guido Crepax's 'Anita in Diretta', one of the great Crepax books in all it's dizzying, rhythmic paneling and beautiful use of colour, compiling two complimentary Anita stories - 'Input Anita' (1986) and 'Anita Color' (1987). Here Crepax evokes two fantastic erotic "environments" that stem from the growing universe of technology in the 1980s and the world's new-found obsession with screens. In the first, Anita is swept into a vortex of mental delirium because she anthropomorphises the data of her computer and transforms into reality what appears on her screen. In the second, in parallel, Anita masturbates to her television, fantasising about the endless characters and scenarios that change with each flick of the remote. Anita meets-clashes in both cases with the magical surface of the unifying screen, a producer of cold imagination, which the individual transforms into a lived, private experience. This participation is strongly unconscious, and in Crepax's stories there is an unacknowledged denunciation of fantasy based on technology. The last step in each story is in fact the "dispossession" of Anita's personality by the fantasy machine, her fall into psychosis, demonstrating that the excess of empathy into the illusionary screen ends up producing a new, dangerous reality.

Guido Crepas (15 July 1933 in Milan - 31 July 2003 in Milan), better known by his nom de plume Guido Crepax, was an Italian comics artist. He studied at the School of Architecture at the University of Milan. After graduating, he made his debut in comic books in 1959 when he contributed his work to Tempo Medico. He joined the new magazine Linus in 1965 with a fantasy comic, 'Neutron', a superhero comic about an art critic with the mysterious power to stop humans or objects via his gaze. It featured a minor character called Valentina, a fashionable, communist Milanese photographer born in 1942, who quickly became Crepax's protagonist and his most famous creation. Valentina became an underground icon of 1960s culture. Crepax's work became noted for his very sophisticated expressionistic yet graphic drawing style, his truely innovative panel work and his unusual compositions that seemed to have more in common with modern art and film than comic strips. His psychedelic, dreamlike storylines were immersive, generally involving a strong dose of erotism and a predilection towards sadomasochism and the surreal. After 'Valentina', other titles followed, such as 'L'Astronave Pirata' (1968), 'La Casa Matta' (1969), 'La Calata di Mac Similiano' (1969), 'Belinda', 'Anita' and 'Bianca'. Crepax's illustrated adaptations of classic erotic stories like De Sade's 'Justine', Pauline Réage's 'Histoire d'O' and Sacher-Masoch's 'Venus in Furs' brought him further acclaim, especially to English audiences who had mostly only read translated Crepax through the pages of Heavy Metal magazine.

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