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…