IronHeart, Il Labirinto Invisibile - La pergamena Misteriosa

An old parchment found in a museum storage room unleashes a spiral of danger and fear.

Ironheart steps in to save the life of a young archaeologist and together they must search for the solution to an unfathomable enigma.

Ironheart and Claudia will find themselves thrown into a vortex of dangers and mysteries from a distant and dark past.

Thanks to a co-production between Digital Index and Associazione Culturale Index and the work of many enthusiasts, the new issue of Ironheart has been published!

First of all, thanks to the meticulous work of the author Franco Tralli, this new Ironheart album, dedicated to the late Roberto Ghiddi , has been published in paper and digital versions.

The album also includes testimonies and memories about Roberto Ghiddi edited by Graziano Giovenzana, Clod, Roberto Baldazzini, Massimo Bonfatti, Stefano Bulgarelli, Denni Lugli, Antonella Scarpa and other friends.

Franco Tralli in his studio in Modena

But let's leave it to Franco Tralli's pen to tell how this new Ironheart was born:

This is a story of adventure and mystery, chases and shootings, puzzles and investigation, of the most classic and traditional kind, decidedly “old fashioned”: the protagonist is Abel Ironheart.
The character of Ironheart, after a long gestation, saw the light on Italian newsstands in November 1995. My lifelong friend Stefano Lusardi and I were its fathers, but in the planning and in everything that followed there was always a third person, another dear friend, Roberto Ghiddi.
I, little more than an enthusiast, he a top-notch professional, first a designer with an extraordinarily innovative style, then editor and artistic director, always with his alternative and innovative streak, of Granata Press, probably the most important Italian publishing house of author comics, and not only, ever.

After some time, the Ironheart project came to an end, life took other paths, the passion remained.

Granata had also closed, Roberto and I often talked about comics, or rather maybe we only talked about comics, he was always informed about all the new trends, the new authors, the new characters.
We both loved French comics, Roberto was always very informed about all the trends in Franco-Belgian comics; when I was going around bookstores in Paris, he was constantly recommending me comics, characters and new authors to keep an eye on, I was a big fan too, but he always surprised me.
He had remained in the publishing field as a profession and still had one foot in comic book publishing; as a second job, in fact, he edited the Italian editions of the French comics published in Italy by Alessandro Editore of Bologna.
The characters we perhaps loved the most were Blake and Mortimer. When he had a new comic to edit, on average one a year, he would show me the tables in preview, he often used me as a consultant, he would make me read the texts and ask me if I had found any errors or inconsistencies.
We both agreed that the original stories, created by Edgar Pierre Jacobs, from the post-war period to the early 70s, were certainly much more beautiful and captivating than the new stories created by other authors, in fact Robbi definitely used much clearer and more explicit terms to support this concept (compared to the originals, the new stories are really annoying!)
Life continued peacefully with the problems and pleasant habits of everyday life, but there was something missing.
One day I said to him: “But now that we are approaching the threshold of sixty (a threshold that has been passed for a long, long time), are we going to end it like this? Are we not going to draw anything anymore? Maybe something that doesn’t matter whether others like it or not, something that we like, that we will do only for ourselves and who cares if it will never be published.” He replied to me: “And what do you want to do?”
I had already been throwing some ideas on paper for a while and looking for some documentation for a new Abel Ironheart story, a reboot of the character, I tried to condense and amalgamate everything into a plot that made sense and, after a long time, I sent it to him.
After a few days he called me and said: “Compared to the quality of the current Blake and Mortimer stories, yours, perhaps, wouldn’t be out of place at all.”
Mamma mia, for me it was a great compliment, even though we complained so much about the new stories, these still sold hundreds of thousands of copies every year; I told him that it had been years since I had touched a pencil and that I would never have been able to draw it by myself, since I have never been a great artist, so I asked him if he was still willing to help me, he replied "start getting back into the drawing, finish writing the story, then when you are ready, okay, I'll give you a hand, let's try to do it together"...

Roberto Ghiddi in Paris in 2010

And so it was, it took a long time between putting the story in order, trying to draw again and finding a balance with everyday commitments, but anyway, what was the rush? It was something that was only ours, that had to have our own time.
Then, when we were finally ready to begin, the first “work” meeting we would have dedicated to reviewing the vanishing points, Roberto was diagnosed with one of those damned diseases that took him away in less than two months, leaving us all much more alone.
But what was the rush?
I told this story to many friends, Fabrizio, Nicola, Graziano, even to my wife Elena, who knew Roberto very well, and everyone, after reading the plot, said the same thing "you have to do it and you have to dedicate it to him"... and here we are.
Be patient Robbi, I'm very slow and I'm not very good, for now be satisfied with the first volume, I know perfectly well that you will be criticizing it (and rightly so), but you still have to be satisfied, if you had been there, this album would have certainly been much better.
In the meantime, hello, we all miss you a lot, we'll talk again in the next volume.

Side note
This album was created thanks to the contribution of Roberto's friends: Fabrizio, Lorena, Marco, Paolo, Stefano, I would never have succeeded alone, I thank them with all my heart for the professionalism, dedication and commitment they have shown by enthusiastically accepting to participate in the project, I also hope to involve other friends so that the final volume sees the light as soon as possible.

Thanks again to everyone

Hi Robbie

Franco Tralli working on the new Ironheart

Read also

Ironheart 90's

Remembering Roberto Ghiddi