Forty years ago, in the number two of Martin Mystère of May 1982, the first team-up between characters of Sergio Bonelli Editore took place. The so-called Detective of the Impossible traveled to Latin America on a plane piloted by a sixty-year-old Mister No. Martin Mystère creator Alfredo Castelli had written many adventures of the WWII veteran who ended up as a tour guide in the Amazon Sergio Bonelli) and had him make a cameo in an aged version (the stories of Mister No are set in the 1950s).
The first real team-up, between Martin Mystère and the then very popular Dylan Dog, would be released in 1990 in a special register and six years later there would also be the (very particular) one between Martin and Nathan Never, the agent. special of the future created by Antonio Serra, Michele Medda and Bepi Vigna.
Three of the aforementioned characters, Nathan Never, Martin Mystère and Mister No, are the protagonists of the hardback volume (released in bookstores and comics shops not on newsstands) “United for the planet”, written by Vigna, drawn by Germano Bonazzi, Marco Foderà and Fabio Grimaldi (designers respectively of the staff of Nathan Never, Martin Mystère and Mister No) and colored by Daria Cerchi.
It is a particular volume, created in collaboration with the Ministry of Ecological Transition.
“The Ministry felt that Nathan Never could be an excellent witness to talk about environmental issues, in particular the harmful effects of greenhouse gases – says Vigna. – We authors and Bonelli were naturally pleased to collaborate. Later the idea was born of involving other Bonellian characters in the story, in particular Mister No, whose adventures are set in the fifties of the last century (when problems related to ecology were still not talked about) and Martin Mystére, who is since the Eighties, a period in which we begin to tackle the issue of climate change ››.
Vigna uses a trick introduced in number 300 of Nathan Never to bring together characters from different eras.
“We have hypothesized the multi-universes, which correspond to the different scenarios of the Bonelli series. This allows Nathan to interact with characters from other publications, creating real team-ups. However, we will reserve this type of events for “special events” like this volume ››.
The story is little more than a pretext: in the future of Nathan Never a sinister multinational, led by the Brotherhood of Mars, enemy of the earth, tries to alter the terrestrial ecosystem, but his plan is thwarted by ours, helped among other things by Doctor Suzuki, who certainly has the not accidental name of Greta.
But it’s nice for an old reader to see the three characters (four if you consider Nathan Legs Weaver’s colleague) interact.
This time, in 1986, Nathan meets the “real” Martin Mystère: in the team-up of the nineties (and in subsequent appearances) it was instead an android with the memories of the Detective of the Impossible (memories, however, still at the end of the eighties when had, in a sense, “duplicated his brain) and for old readers it is nice to see Martin use the so-called” murchadna “, a thousand-year-old ray weapon built by the ancient civilization of Mu (rival of Atlantis), which he no longer uses in more recent stories.
“The Martin of the Eighties is also the one my colleagues and I wrote scripts for when we started working for Bonelli – continues Vigna. – Indeed, the beam weapon resembles the pistol that Nathan often uses, whose power can be adjusted to stun opponents ››.
The designers had fun playing with the look of Mister No, which changes with the changing era, in the fifties it is that of the stories of the last twenty years, is dressed as a bourgeois in the eighties by Martin and goes back to that of the first twenty years of the series (between 1975 and 1995) at the time of Nathan.
“I have tried to be careful in these choices and also in the characterization of the characters – concludes Vigna. – I wanted readers to find their heroes as they knew them in those years. It’s a lot of fun to be able to jump back and forth in time and in comics it can be done ››.
‹‹ United for the planet ›› was created to raise awareness of the environment, but for fans it is also a way to see old friends live an adventure together.