“Youth is cast as a stark fable in Spit Three Times by Davide Reviati, a restless, lyrical epic about three boys and their Roma neighbours set in a postwar Italian backwater. There’s an elegiac economy to Reviati’s glorious panels, which show darkened rooms, fields that bleed into infinity and balletic figures convulsed in rage and ecstasy, as time slips through their fingers.”
– James Smart, Best Comics and Graphic Novels of 2020, The Guardian
“It is a rare pleasure to find a graphic novel where energetic black-and-white drawings and simple but eloquent text are intertwined with such harmony, each enhancing the other. ... a prime example of the melding of propulsive storytelling and a distinctive artist’s hand... Ultimately, Reviati delivers a penetrating view of the vicissitudes of developing into an adult in a world that is fraught with generations of mistrust, anger, and poverty and yet is suffused with the vibrant enchantment of being human.”
– Rita D. Jacobs, World Literature Today
“In this languid coming-of-age saga set in a rural Italian village, a group of indolent, disaffected teenagers, including introspective narrator Guido and his thuggish friend Grisu, spend their days desultorily drinking, smoking dope, and creating minor havoc. Flashbacks depict the boys’ childhood, when their aimless days spent together seem little different from their rudderless adolescence. Occasionally their paths cross with the Stančičs, a Romani family who after WWII fled communist Yugoslavia ,and in particular, their disheveled, near-feral daughter, Loretta. The uneasy relationship between the townspeople and the “gypsies” is a persistent undercurrent throughout the book; at one point, one of Loretta’s brothers delivers a chilling monologue detailing the Nazis’ persecution of the Romani. The meandering story, which clocks in at a hefty 500-plus pages, brings to mind a rural, impoverished, and fuzzily mystical version of Fellini’s I Vitelloni. Reviati’s feathery drawings are even wispier than the story; the characters’ indistinct faces and simply outlined figures reflect the vagueness of their lives.”
– Booklist
“Haunting and dreamlike, Reviati’s tome threads together the coming-of-age story of Guido, a teenage slacker who struggles to express himself, and the saga of the Stançiçs, a Roma family living on the margins of their small Italian town... Throughout, Reviati probes the intersection of history and memory, composing in fragments that double back on themselves. Reviati’s pen-and-ink lines are confident: shadows heavy, faces half blank but elegantly realized... [T]hose willing to slip into the town’s mysteries will be rewarded by Reviati’s stylish, brooding art, which captures the ache of losses small and large.”
– Publishers Weekly
“Reviati’s depiction of the life and cultural realities of the Roma, and the idea of a non-territorial nation, is a healthy corrective to the 21st century’s obsession with national borders and their military enforcement. His drawings and text evoke a palpable sense of nature, weather and a spatial freedom that crosses all borders.”
– Ben Katchor, author and illustrator Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer
“A masterpiece in black and white.”
– L'Humanité
“In Davide Reviati's Italian graphic novel violence and vulnerability magnificently coexist.”
– Le Monde
“More than 500 pages and they read like they were less than half as many. Thanks to the impressive fluidity of the montage and the lightness of the writing.”
– Internazionale
“Integration, drugs, secrets, ignorance, wisdom, rural depression, dreams, threats, coming of age: this and much more is summoned by Reviati's imagistic poetry. You'll find your eyes glistening once again.”
– Il Mucchio Selvaggio
“Spit Three Times is a fairy tale/fable both ancient and modern at the same time. It sucks you in with its raw reality and then launches you into dreams, nightmares, and fantasies that have been embedded in our collective unconscious for ages upon ages. And above all, I believed every moment... every image... very word.”
– Michael Imperioli, actor and author of The Perfume Burned His Eyes
