User:Jules TH 16/Massimo De Vita

Massimo De Vita (born May 29, 1941 in Milan) is an Italian Disney comics artist and writer. Alongside Romano Scarpa, Giorgio Cavazzano and Giovan Battista Carpi he is generally heralded as one of the most popular Italian cartoonists. Since 1996 he has been focusing almost exclusively on stories set in the Mickey Mouse universe, even though he was responsible for many influential Donald (particularly in his superhero role) and Scrooge McDuck stories before.

Pier Lorenzo De Vita had been one of the first Italian Disney artists, and his son Massimo started his comics career early (his first Topolino covers were released in 1959), initially collaborating with his father. Massimo De Vita soon became an artist in his own right, but it took several years until he had developed his signature style. De Vita always inks his pencils himself, which led to his style becoming quite individual. Nowadays, the general consensus is that Massimo De Vita by far surpassed his father Pier Lorenzo.

De Vita's importance for the Italian Disney production cannot be overstated: He has been the main artist of the early Duck Avenger comics (from 1971 to 1991, he drew a large proportion of the stories featuring this very popular character), and many well-regarded series and multi-part story arcs were partially or completely drawn by him. The first of these sagas was the "Sword as Ice" trilogy (later turned into a tetralogy thanks to a later sequel co-written with Fabio Michelini) loosely inspired by Lord of the Rings, completely written and drawn by De Vita and starring Mickey and Goofy. Before this, Massimo De Vita had already created the character Professor Zachary Zapotek, who would go on to be a regular fixture of Italian Mickey Mouse stories due to him being one of the two academics who send Mickey and Goofy into the past for scientific time travels. Unlike the early Zapotek stories, these Time Machine stories weren't written by De Vita, but he drew many of them.

The cross-over saga "The Search for the Zodiac Stone" (written by Bruno Sarda), which includes the two professors and their Time Machine as well as Duck Avenger, was also largely drawn by Massimo De Vita. Bruno Sarda also invented Goofy's cousin Arizona Goof, whose stories were again mostly drawn by De Vita (not Arizona's debut story though) - just like all stories so far with a more recent Sarda invention, Mickey's uncle Jeremy. De Vita also wrote some Arizona Goof stories himself.

The partnership with author Giorgio Pezzin, which had blossomed during Duck Avenger's early period, would lead to several other projects. This included the "Lords of the Galaxy" [nb: Unofficial English title] saga, a galactic adventure inspired by Star Wars once again starring Mickey and Goofy, although only the first two (out of four) chapters were drawn by De Vita. The next notable cycle was the 14-part historic tale "Once Upon a Time in America" [nb: Unofficial English title] telling the story of Mickey's and Goofy's ancestors, all episodes of which bar two (that were handled by Silvia Ziche and Fabrizio Petrossi instead) were drawn by Massimo De Vita. The "DeMouse Stories" [nb: Unofficial English title], recounting the often fantastic and supernatural adventures and discoveries of another ancestor of Mickey's, would turn out to be the last co-operation of the two artists, as Giorgio Pezzin wasn't happy about De Vita's sudden habit of re-writing Pezzin's scripts.

More recently, Massimo De Vita helped to make a young author named Casty popular. The two have collaborated on twelve stories (e.g. "The Magnificient Doublejoke"), of which one ("Topolino e gli spaventogrammi") was actually scripted by De Vita, but this happened for practical reasons: Casty had been working on several other stories at the same time, so he left it to De Vita to write the script to Casty's initial plot. One of the few Duck stories done by De Vita after 1996 is a sequel to the Carl Barks classic The Golden Helmet.

Massimo De Vita's work, particularly the aforementioned series and sagas, has been reprinted several times in Europe. The Italian series "Tesori made in Italy" has dedicated four volumes to De Vita. In Germany, a hardback book in the series "Die besten Geschichten von..." was released featuring a selection of De Vita's stories. The "Sword of Ice" saga got its third German release in 2018. It was also later printed for a US release in full as part of Fantagraphics' Disney Masters series.

Even though many fans consider the modern De Vita "past his prime", he nonetheless regularly scored high points when the TopoOscar was invented by papersera.net. In the first fan voting, he ended up as the sixth-most popular artist. In the following years he remained similarly popular (2008: #11, 2010: #5, 2011: #4, 2012: #10, 2013: #8, 2014: #10, 2015: #8). In 2010 he also received the Papersera award, coupled with a book dedicated to him entitled "Il cugino di Alf" (= "Alf's cousin", which refers to Goofy's heroic role in the "Sword of Ice" saga).

In 2020, he announced his retirement, quoting among the reasons the increasing censorship from Topolino's publisher, which led to a plot he had written to lose most of its point.