For more than twenty years, Maicol & Mirco have moved through Italian comics like a line that’s both sharp and trembling at the same time. From the days of Kerosene to today, it’s a universe that has never stopped shifting within a territory made of cutting sentences, scribbled little men, and truths that make you laugh only for an instant—before giving way to something more uncomfortable. Essential down to the bone, and precisely for that reason able to hit deep.

Behind these two names today is Micheal Rocchetti, a cartoonist who constantly plays with the double, with splitting, with the idea that simplicity and complexity can coexist in the same panel. His work moves between paradox and reality, between moral and political responsibility, between the absurd and everyday news—showing how comics can still be, and perhaps today more than ever, an incredibly powerful tool for reading the contemporary.

In this conversation we retrace the birth of the project, the influences that shaped it, and the meaning of a language that, by stripping away everything superfluous, manages to say a great deal. Because when a sentence is “enough,” Micheal knows it. And when it isn’t, it simply doesn’t exist.

Hi—I’ve been following Maicol & Mirco for 20 years (?) now, since the days of Kerosene (was that twenty years ago?). How did this project and the collaboration with Mirko Petrelli come about?

It’s the fault of our existence. We simply exist. Two friends existed, two comics readers existed, and at a certain point two comics authors existed. Then, simply, a comics author and a cartoon animator existed. Names are another thing. The names both stayed with the comics author. Because Maicol & Mirco are two names as simple and as complicated as our comics. Simple and complicated. We can’t separate those names from those comics.

Your style is very essential, hermetic, both in the drawings and in the texts. Is it a way of removing noise? Is the scribble an aesthetic, narrative, or instinctive choice?

For me everything is essential. What I draw and what I look at. What I see, what I love, what I hate. If you pay attention, it’s all terribly simple. All terribly essential.

What influenced you—what authors, both aesthetically and narratively?

So many. Hundreds. But I’ll mention the ones that memory brings to the surface first.

Benito Jacovitti, Filippo Scòzzari, Jean-Marc Reiser, Altan, Edika, Osamu Tezuka, Bruno Bozzetto, Carlo Peroni, Sandro Dossi, Adriano Carnevali, Daniel Clowes, Grazia Nidasio, Rob Liefeld, Leiji Matsumoto, Hideshi Hino.

How do you know when a sentence is “enough”?

I know it.

The absurd and paradox are recurring elements in your strips. What role do they play for you in telling reality?

They’re the only possible key to open the door to the contemporary. Doesn’t it ever happen to you that you agree with something and you agree just as much with the opposite of that something? It happens to me all the time.

In this moment that’s so politically polarized, do you feel your stance comes more from a moral responsibility or a political responsibility?

Political responsibility is a moral responsibility.

Your characters often seem stuck in situations bigger than them. Is that a reflection of how you see contemporary society, of how you feel?

Of how it is.

How much—and in what way—has the spread of social media affected how you produce and share your comics?

Comics are social. Maybe the first social networks. Social networks are comics: words and drawings that mix, giving life to something else.

Today, in your view, what space do comics have in telling what’s happening around us?

Infinite. The same space they have to tell what’s happening inside us. Infinite.