Tory councillor Giovanni Spinella reveals secret love for comics – and bizarre plots he thinks up
Published: 17th March, 2011
by RICHARD OSLEY
OSWALD Mosley rises to become the fascist Prime Minister of the country but – just as he begins dotting the countryside with concentration camps – Wallis Simpson assassinates him at Buckingham Palace.
This is the chilling storyline dreamed up by a mild-mannered Conservative councillor with ambitions to swap a life working in the City for a future in comic book writing.
Giovanni Spinella, who represents Frognal at the Town Hall, has thrown open the doors on his other life as a rookie strip scripter – revealing in the process that some of his work is best reserved for mature readers.
In comic book stories he has pitched to big-name publishers, a gory level of violence splatters across the pages.
In Atrox, four short stories scripted by Cllr Spinella, a love-torn man scalpels out the eyeballs of his lover’s friends and relatives in a manic display of devotion.
Another is called Love Alien Sex, a sci-fi, carnal comedy.
But it is the blueprint of Cllr Spinella’s latest idea which really shows the power of his imagination. His “what if” alternative history has Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, in charge of pre-war Britain.
In a rush of drama, first Winston Churchill tries to shoot him – but fails. As the war hero PM is carted off accused of betrayal, Wallis Simpson, the American socialite King Edward VIII gave up the throne for, bursts in and blasts Mosley to death. In real life, Adolf Hitler, Mosley’s idol, was reported to have said when they met that Simpson would have made a good Queen.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, he indicates in the back of his comic books that he is more “well adjusted” than his scripts might suggest.
“The insane man doesn’t know he’s crazy,” Cllr Spinella joked on Tuesday. “You just dig out ideas. I was trying to do something different from superheroes, experimenting with horror writing. Don’t worry: nothing like that is about me in real life. It’s not what people think of from a Conservative councillor and comic books are seen as a geeky world, but it is time to redefine the geek. People can be obsessed about all sorts of things: clothes, football, comic books. We are all geeks.”
Cllr Spinella’s home in Canfield Gardens, West Hampstead, is a mini-cavern of comic books with everything from the traditional superheroes from Marvel and DC, to challenging graphic novels about the history of the Middle East.
After growing up in Sicily, New York, Milan and then Luxembourg, Cllr Spinella came to London and worked in financial IT in the City. After 10 years of that, he stepped aside and got involved in local government. “In the comic book world you find that people are often either left-wing or are not bothered about politics at all, they are just into their strips,” added Cllr Spinella. “In fact the majority of my friends in comics are left-wing.”