“Ridire”, Tunuè, the latest book by Pera Toons which is in sixth place in the best-selling list of the week
Those who have children and grandchildren will perhaps have noticed a phenomenon that has conquered children and teenagers in recent years, making them laugh, challenge each other with jokes and, above all, devour books. Yes, the paper ones, which you flip through the pages with your nose. This phenomenon it’s called Pera Toonsthe brand of apparently very simple cartoons, jokes, puns (one for all so to speak: A banana asks a cucumber “why doesn’t the tomato cross the road?” “Because… it’s red!”), puns, riddles , puzzles, short stories which, however, are so popular that they have generated a real publishing sensation.
Behind this stage name is Alessandro Perugini, a forty-two-year-old failed engineer, then an advertising graphic designer and, finally, an author of comics first on the Web, then landed in books, with five million followers, titles translated abroad and who will be one of the guest Italian authors at the next Frankfurt Book Fair . We asked him directly how he did it; Tuscan accent and ready joke, he tells us that it all started almost by chance. «I have always been a passionate reader of comics, from Mickey Mouse to Lupo Alberto, from Manga to Leo Ortolani, passing through Mattioli’s brilliant Pinky which appeared for a long time in the Giornalino. I was also good at drawing but my passion for mathematics prevailed, so after high school I enrolled in engineering. Studying, however, wasn’t for me, I much preferred video games and comics.”
So he leaves university and from Perugia, where he had moved, he arrives in Milan to do the IED and become an advertising graphic designer. «For work I also had to take care of clients’ social networks and I thought that the best way to practice was to open my own pages. So I dusted off my old passion for comics and puzzles. On Instagram, first, and then on Facebook and TikTok, and the series was born Who killed Kenny?, simple drawings, a slightly surreal crime and the invitation to solve the mystery. They liked it (a policewoman from the Parma RIS also complimented me), I was increasingly followed and I made the leap to YouTube, where I began to experiment with simple animations. In the meantime, the number of followers was growing.”
If the name Pera Toons began to circulate among kids, Alessandro continued to work as a graphic designer, until he realized that the first earnings were also arriving. That’s when he decided to invest all his time in this creative activity. The Tunué publishing house took notice of him and the first books were published. Now, when he goes to a bookshop for a copy signing, there is a crazy queue of children accompanied by their parents, five consecutive hours of signatures with dedications for a popularity worthy of great rock stars.
«The nice thing is that it’s not just children who enjoy my jokes. I also have a large audience of eighty and ninety year olds. As if in this phase of life we had more desire to live in the present, where a liberating laugh is the best that can happen to us. In conclusion a laugh is a cuddle that we give ourselves without contraindications and side effects. I didn’t invent anything, I just reinterpreted what comedians have always done, puns, jokes, unusual combinations of words. They come to me straight away, the drawing amplifies their exhilarating effect to which, then, on social media, I add my voice.”
Ok, the children have a book in their hands, but ultimately they are jokes. Real books, however, are something else, some might object. “Actually many teachers thank me because they notice that children learn the different meanings of the same wordto play with the language and become familiar with the book object, even those who have more difficulties because they are dyslexic or have cognitive deficits. They also invite me to schools! And Pera Toons books unite families, adults and children alike, laughing together at the same cartoons. For these reasons I feel a great responsibility and knowing how much children love me I pay a lot of attention to language, I avoid vulgarity, stereotypes and offences. And then I have an inflexible judge, my daughter Arianna, who is seven years old, the same as when I entered the world of comics». And maybe this isn’t a coincidence either!