Webcomic Weekly: Ciro’s ‘Son Of A Pizza Man’
by Richard Bruton
Welcome once more to Webcomic Weekly, or Webcomic whenever I manage to put it out, you pick the title you prefer. Anyway, time for more great webcomics, with something from artist/illustrator Ciro… Son Of A Pizza Man…
I can find out very little about Ciro online, plenty of art on his Instagram, a YouTube channel mentioning gaming. But that’s about it. But I stumbled across Son Of A Pizza Man on Twitter somehow. A simple little idea, 12 pages, all starting with an interview of a busy, busy, busy pizza shop owner and sole employee…
The art’s light, vibrant, cartoonish (in the very best way), full of great comic imagery, all showing you just how busy, busy, busy Ciro’s pizza man can be, day in, day out, falling asleep in front of the TV at night folding pizza boxes, up at 4.00 am to head out to his pizza place. Heck, he’s so busy at times he’s making the pizzas with his feet.
No, he won’t hire anyone to help out, ‘More people, more problems, you gotta teach ’em, keep an eye on ’em, deal with drama, fights break out, it’s a whole mess.’ He’s content with the flour and the dough and the sauce and the cheese and that’s it.
So, a simple, simple life, busy life but he’s happy in his own way.
We go page after page of going through his life, the few people he talks to – distributors, workmen coming in occasionally to fix things, the health inspector. And then there’s the customers…
It’s gloriously fluid, the art flowing across each page, all populated with all manner of the strange customers.
And then things take a strange little turn across the final three pages… where everything takes on a little too much red. I’ll show you page 10, a crop of page 11, and then leave you to go and enjoy it all and really love the twist in the ending…
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Son Of A Pizza Man is a one-off story according to Ciro, although he does say this:
“I intended this as a first chapter that could also serve as its own one-off story. I’ve been slowly chipping away at the larger story, so if you’re interested hold tight!'”
Yes, that would be a great thing, hopefully I’ll be updating you on further parts of this one and we’ll find out where he’s going to take us after THAT final page.
Just a few little highlights for me to end with. The art has a gloriously fluid style, with all the characters played as impossible extremes, almost an animated style in a way, or the sort of thing that greats like Kyle Baker or even Harvey Kurtzmann do, not a direct comparison but that sense of easy movement, getting every bit of motion into a still picture. You know, like this…
There’s such a lovely feel to that panel, one of those you can immediately visualise the before and the after scenes, playing the way the pizza’s spun and thrown, the outstretched hands and fingers manipulating it perfectly. And then your mind fills it all in, the spin of the pizza through the air, the effortless catch of the pizza maker. And all that from one little static image. Classy work, perfectly done.
Or the way Ciro works in both character and situational comedy through it all. The idea below, that one panel health inspector bit relies on the absurd to work, but the way it’s sold makes it a great little moment…
And then there’s the expressions we have and the simplicity of line to sell them. Take a look again at the panels about and thrill to how few lines you’ll see on the pizza man’s face and yet how perfectly expressive it all it. Or for another version of what I’m talking about, there’s this…
Again, everything you need to know about the moment and the shock and the surprise is there in so few lines and that vibrant and shocking shift in the colour palette.
Well worth looking at. Find more by Ciro at his Linktree, including the option to download the comic or read it on Tapas – and do the decent thing and donate when you download.
