E voilà!

In the third issue of Ratman Collection by Leo Ortolani, there is a panel in which Rat-man leaps onto his beloved’s balcony, all puffed up, and says: “E voilà!”. The comic effect comes from the fact that in the previous panels he was throwing himself off the balcony, only to show up 3 months later as if nothing had happened, because “they took my cast off yesterday”.

Ratman was right

In the same way, after a whopping almost 25 years, the Tiphares website reopens with an article titled “E voilà!”. What happened? It seemed a closed chapter, but in reality Tiphares never really died. It was buried under ashes, but deep down there was always a small spark. Several attempts were made to revive that spark. All failed. Because work got in the way, commitments, disillusionment, laziness, life, floods, locusts (quote). I paid for the domain for 20 years for nothing, the time has come to do something with it.

Why is it different this time? I don’t know, who knows. A series of fortunate events, the awareness that it’s no longer 1997, the never-dormant desire to tell what we like and what we don’t. I could have done the same thing on social media, but I’m doing this mainly for myself, for the rest of the editorial team, to have a historical archive of articles to reread and say: “Look how good we were”.

This new course will mainly be a collection of old articles taken from the old website and the CD-ROMs. There may be new content, it depends on how motivated I (we?) will be. It certainly won’t only be about Japanese comics and animation. What is certain is that this time the site will stay here, to remind us that even though we now have a few white hairs, once we were pioneers.

And anyway, they took my cast off yesterday.