Think that comics-loving directors started with Kevin Smith and Robert Rodriguez? Wrong! Federico Fellini, famed Italian surrealist, was a cartoonist early in his career, and two books of his doodles are set to debut at next year’s Rome Film Festival

Italy’s ANSA news agency said the two books of the film icon’s daily sketches will make their premiere at the annual film festival, which is tentatively scheduled to run Oct. 18-26. The famed film director and former cartoonist, who died in 1993, had long maintained that the film industry has a direct correlation to the dream world. “Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another,” he said in 1984. “It’s a language made of images. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.” ANSA said the books, which contain approximately 400 drawings by Fellini, were acquired for the festival by one of its directors, Mario Sesti.

Meanwhile, a big exhibit of Tintin and Herge art is set to open at the Pompidou Center in Paris , running from Dec. 20 to Feb. 19. The website is in French so we’ll let more literate people tell us about it. Bookslut where we ganked this from, links to a mention of the show in the UK Guardian.