''Sor Pampurio'' is an Italian

comic strip A comic strip is a sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st ...

series created by Carlo Bisi (1929-1978).

Background

Started in 1929, the comic strips were published, with some breaks, by ''

Il Corriere dei Piccoli The ''Corriere dei Piccoli'' (Italian for "Courier of the Little Ones"), later nicknamed ''Corrierino'' ("Little Courier"), was a weekly magazine for children published in Italy from 1908 to 1995. It was the first Italian periodical to make a re ...

'' until 1978.Paolo Gallarinari (cured by), ''Un maestro dell'ironia borghese. Carlo Bisi fumettista e illustratore nella cultura del suo tempo'', ANAFI, 2011. Every episode starts depicting Sor Pampurio ("Mr. Pampurio")'s happiness about his new house, a happiness that turns in a few frames, for a reason or another, in an increasing discontent and in a new moving at the end of any story.B.P. Boschesi, ''Manuale dei fumetti'', Mondadori, 1976. The comic strip received some very different critical interpretations: during the years it was accused of being an uncritical adhesion of fascist values or marked as "

bourgeois The bourgeoisie ( , ) is a social class, equivalent to the middle or upper middle class. They are distinguished from, and traditionally contrasted with, the proletariat by their affluence, and their great cultural and financial capital. They ...

comics", while on the contrary other critics considered the comics positively as a slight parody of bourgeois values, a symbolic critic to the rampant

consumerism Consumerism is a social and economic order that encourages the acquisition of goods and services in ever-increasing amounts. With the Industrial Revolution, but particularly in the 20th century, mass production led to overproduction—the supp ...

and a reflection about the inability to achieve happiness through material values.

References

Italian comic strips Italian comics characters 1929 comics debuts 1978 comics endings Humor comics Text comics Fictional Italian people Comics characters introduced in 1929 {{Italy-comics-stub