The sommo Topolino in the dark Forest. Ideas to a linguistic Reading of Topolino’s Hell

The Divine Comedy has not only had a profound influence on Italian Literature and Language since the very beginning, but it also continues to be a source of inspiration for many authors and works of different styles and cultural fields, from music to film etc. Within the vast amount of comics inspired by Dante’s masterpiece, this paper focuses on the parody of Dante’s Inferno “L’Inferno di Topolino” (“Mickey’s Inferno”). This comic book story was created in Italy back in 1949-50 for the Topolino Magazine by Guido Martina (writer) and Angelo Bioletto (cartoonist), two of the first comic book artists of Disney Italian comics, and it is the very first of the famous Disney Great Parodies. This study proposes an interpretation of this Disney parody from a linguistic perspective. After listing the main distinguishing features of parody as a whole, it provides an analysis of the comic book history “L’inferno di Topolino” by focusing on the linguistic techniques used to accomplish the parodic purpose on the one hand, and on the specific of a comic book parody on the other. Many strategies of imitating old Italian morphology, syntax and lexicon are pointed out.