Can a symbolic character of twentieth-century American popular culture, such as Superman, converse with one of the founding figures of medieval European literature, Dante Alighieri? Can the poetry of the Supreme Poet coexist with the drawn plates of a contemporary graphic novel without losing depth or expressive effectiveness? These questions are tried to be answered by Superman: Inferno, the new volume published by Panini Comics and signed by Marco Nucci and Fabio Celoni, two authors known to the Italian comics audience. The graphic novel, released in bookstores on June 25, 2025, brings the DC superhero inside an entirely new context: Dante’s Florence, transfigured by a disturbing rift that breaks the city and opens a gateway to a world dominated by infernal threats.
The story opens in 2021, during the celebration of the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death. Clark Kent and Lois Lane, correspondents on a special mission for the Daily Planet, find themselves visiting Florence on the very anniversary. What should be a cultural trip turns into an apocalyptic nightmare: a deep rift opens in the ground of the Piazza della Signoria, altering space and time, and generating an access to a dimension that has the flavor of the underworld.
The unexpected event triggers a series of supernatural threats that seem to emerge directly from the circles of Dante’s Inferno. Superman thus finds himself facing dark forces that threaten the balance between worlds. References to the Divine Comedy are not limited to setting or narrative pretext: indeed, at the heart of the plot is an apparently lost Dantean formula that may be the only tool capable of stopping the advance of the infernal armies.
The 64-page comic book moves along two planes: on the one hand, there is the reconstruction of a real Florence, pulsating with precise cultural and architectural references; on the other, a mythological and visionary narrative unfolds, where the figure of the superhero takes on almost archetypal nuances. The mixture of languages, comics, literature, mythology, represents the center of the project and is also its most complex element. Superman: Inferno does not simply superimpose two distant universes, but attempts a true contamination, bringing the language of the graphic novel into dialogue with structures and symbolism proper to medieval poetry.
The authors, Fabio Celoni on the drawings and Marco Nucci on the script, have previously collaborated on works in which comics interact with great literary narratives. In this case, the work goes beyond mere quotation or homage, seeking a structural encounter between visual form and the written word.
“I didn’t expect to have fun, doing Superman,” Marco Nucci writes on Instagram, "I expected more of a thing like having anxiety, and I have to say that I also had anxiety, for goodness sake, we’d miss it, but more than that I had fun, and I also know@fabioceloni, who, in literal respect to the fact that the story is set in hell, did a job out of the grace of god."
Celoni and Nucci’s plates show a gothic, suspended Florence, shot through with dark gleams and disturbing visions. Making the volume even more articulate is the presence of an extra section, in which working materials, preparatory sketches and behind-the-scenes insights are collected.
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| Superman and Dante meet in Florence in new graphic novel signed by Nucci and Celoni |
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