The Complete Cosmicomics

by Italo Calvino

‘Cosmicomics are indebted particularly to Leopardi, the Popeye comics, Samuel Beckett, Giordano Bruno, Lewis Carroll, the paintings of Matta and in some cases the works of Landolfi, Immanuel Kant, Borges, and Grandville’s engravings’

Calvino expanded the frontiers of fiction by making his own literary discourse embrace science (physics, embryology, DNA, computing theory), mathematics, philosophy and the visual arts (paintings, cartoons, cinema, architecture). The main thrust of his poetics was constantly to raise the target which literature sets itself: he challenges literature to describe the indescribable, from macrocosm to microcosm, from the Big Bang to the division of cells.

Climb up on the Moon? Of course we did. All you had to do was row out to it in a boat and, when you were underneath, prop a ladder against her and scramble up.