The Dylan Dog Case Files

AUTHOR: Marcheselli, Mauro; Sclavi, Tiziano

ARTIST: Bruno Brindisi (penciller and inker); Giam-piero Casertano (penciller and inker); Luigi Piccatto (penciller and inker); Angelo Stano (penciller and inker); Andrea Venturi (penciller and inker); Mike Mignola (cover artist)

PUBLISHER: Sergio Bonelli Editore (Italian); Dark Horse Comics (English)

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION:Dylan Dog, 1986- (partial English translation, 1999)

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2009

Publication History

Dylan Dog was created by writer Tiziano Sclavi in 1986 for Sergio Bonelli Editore. Ever since, it has been a ninety-six-page-long monthly. In addition to the regular series, several semestral and annual books have been published in Italian: Dylan Dog Special (1987-2010), Dylan Dog: L’almanacco della paura (1991), Dylan Dog presenta Groucho (1992-1999), Albo gigante Dylan Dog (1993), Maxi Dylan Dog (1998), and Dylan Dog Color Fest (2007). There also are numerous reprints. Stories are usually black-and-white; occasionally, issues are full color. The page size is 6.29 × 8.27 inches, a classic format for Italian comic books.

After the first period of intense writing by Sclavi, stories were written by other authors. During the 1990’s, Dylan Dog reached its record of almost one million copies sold monthly. Later, the sales decreased; in 2008, 170,000 copies sold in Italy, not counting foreign editions. Nonetheless, Dylan Dog is the second best-selling comic book series in Italy after Gianluigi Bonelli’s long-running Tex, which started in 1948. Dylan Dog has also sold in Argentina, Brazil, Croatia, Finland, France, Greece, Holland, Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Serbia, Russia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, and Sweden.

In 1999, Dark Horse Comics published a six-issue monthly with some Dylan Dog representative adventures, and in 2002, the publisher issued another adventure in a one-shot book, all of which is included in the omnibus paperback. These stories were originally published in Italy in the regular series, in issue 1 (October, 1986), issue 81 (June, 1993), issue 19 (April, 1988), issue 8 (May, 1987), issue 25 (October, 1988), issue 26 (November, 1988), and issue 84 (September, 1993).

Plot

In Dawn of the Living Dead, Sybil Browning is accused of the murder of her husband, John. Thus, she hires Dylan Dog, claiming that when she “killed” the man he was already dead. In fact, he was and had been made a zombie by the sorcerer Xabaras. Dylan Dog faces Xabaras, who secretly is the evil half of his father, mystically separated from the good one. Because this is the first story of the series, it also focuses on introducing the main characters and their psychological makeup.

Johnny Freak has a realistic and “educational” plot. Johnny Arkham is an eighteen-year-old boy nicknamed “Freak” by the press. For his entire life, he has been the victim of systematic violence, amputations, and surgical removals: His parents have used him as a human store (organs, body parts) for his brother Dougal, who suffers from a degenerative disease. One day, Dylan Dog finds Johnny, escaped from the prison of his house, and tries to help him. Johnny has the soul of an artist but is deaf and mute and unable to explain his story; therefore, he is taken back to his parents, who imprison him again in the basement of their house. When Dylan figures out what is really happening, he does not hesitate to intervene. The conclusion of the story is distressing, surprising, and narratively compelling.

In Memories from the Invisible World, a murderer kills prostitutes in London. One of the prostitutes asks Dylan to investigate, before she or other women get killed. It is the beginning of a sad romance. A witness to the facts, an “invisible man,” is writing a disturbing diary: He turned invisible when the last person who noticed him stopped being aware of his existence. Both he and the butcher are portrayed as results of social indifference.

In The Return of the Monster, Damien is a psychopath who has been confined for sixteen years at the Harlech Asylum, in Scotland, until he escapes. Seemingly, he has killed all the members of a rich family, the Steeles, except Leonora, a blind girl, who was a teenager at the time of the massacre. Now, Damien, formerly the stableman of the Steeles, seems to be about to come back, possibly to complete his butchery; Dylan appears to be the only one who can stop him.

Morgana introduces the character Morgana for the first time. She is one of the zombies created by Xabaras in issue 1 and is his wife and Dylan’s mother. Dylan is not aware of the latter until issue 100 of the original series. In this story, he falls in love with her. The main plot, however, is a zombie story full of action. It is also a “metacomic,” in that the author of the story appears as himself, that is, as the creator of the adventure, reflecting on how he can conclude the plot.

In After Midnight, Dylan forgets his house keys and has to spend the night wandering London. After midnight, anything can happen; people’s nightmares even become true, and Dylan finds himself trapped in such nightmares. In the middle of the night, London is a mishmash of surreal, frightening, and deadly figures (monsters, killers, ghosts), but also of very human and sad situations, which are narrated as bitter social commentaries.

In Zed, Zed is a mysterious land, an Edenic world where everyone wants to go. It is possible to reach it only by paying a stiff price to Scout, the guide who possesses the key to this land. Among those who want to find a refuge in Zed is Joey MacFarris, a young woman, former militant member of the Irish Republican Army, and girlfriend of Dylan in this issue. Contrary to appearances, Zed is not an idyllic place. Dylan discovers its secret and that it is just as dangerous as reality.

Volumes

•Dylan Dog, Volume 1: Dawn of the Living Dead (1999). Collects issue 1 of the original Italian series. The very first story of Dylan Dog presents Sclavi’s characters, the general style of the series, and the elegant drawings of Stano. Considered a cult issue within the series and one of the most sold and reprinted comic books of all time.

•Dylan Dog, Volume 2: Johnny Freak (1999). Collects issue 81 of the original Italian series. It presents the “other” Dylan Dog: the part of the series not devoted to fantasy/horror but to “nextdoor monsters,” that is, to the moral squalor that humankind can reach. This is a touching story and one of the most beloved by younger readers. Drawings are particularly effective.

•Dylan Dog, Volume 3: Memories from the Invisible World (1999). Collects issue 19. This Volume is one of the deepest social commentaries in the whole series. The fantastic element is used to reflect on the social condition of recognition and approval.

•Dylan Dog, Volume 4: The Return of the Monster (1999). Collects issue 8 of the original Italian series. Firmly within the horror genre, the story recalls Alfred Hitchcock’s films and crime magazines. As always, Dylan Dog is full of allusions to literature and cinema. Drawings are not the best of the series; therefore, one can argue that this story did not deserve to be included in the American edition as much as the others did.

•Dylan Dog, Volume 5: Morgana (1999). Collects issue 25 of the original Italian series. With the introduction of Morgana, Dylan Dog reveals new details about the protagonist’s past. A narrative continuity begins to develop. This story features a mystical Oedipus conflict that is a compelling idea in mainstream comics and is potentially shocking for American readers.

•Dylan Dog, Volume 6: After Midnight (1999). Collects issue 26 of the original Italian series. Explicitly inspired by Martin Scorsese’s film After Hours (1985) but retold in a horror key, it displays a wide range of surprising graphical methods of rendering a nightmarish evening for Dylan Dog in London.

•Dylan Dog: Zed (2002). One-shot; collects issue 84 of the original Italian series. Zed is one of the most impressive otherworlds created by Sclavi, and the drawings by Bruno Brindisi complement the script. It is a much appreciated story because it is one of the few written by Dylan Dog’s creator.

Characters

•Dylan Dog is a thirty-three-year-old, six-foot-tall Caucasian man, modeled after British actor Rupert Everett. He lives in London at 7 Craven Road and works as a private investigator, specializing in paranormal activities. However, he is often also involved in “normal” stories of ordinary violence and human meanness. He is a melancholic type; among his interests are clarinet and his galleon miniature model. As the series progresses, the reader discovers new details of Dylan’s history and psychological makeup, for example, that he is a former Scotland Yard agent and currently a teetotaler but formerly an alcoholic.

•Felix, a.k.a. Groucho, Dylan’s sidekick (known as Groucho in the original edition) is modeled on Groucho Marx in terms of his looks and screwball sense of humor; in the American edition, his moustache is erased. A recurring theme is that, in many issues of the series, he often throws his Bodeo revolver to Dylan when he is in trouble, so that Dylan can stop his enemies.

•Inspector Bloch, of Scotland Yard, is a stout, middle-aged man. He was Dylan’s boss when Dylan was a police agent. He is a widower and was father to a problematic son, Virgil, who died before the series’ main time line. His assistant is Jenkins, a dense and funny agent who takes everything to the letter.

•Xabaras, whose name is the anagram of Abraxas (a demon), is the evil half of Dylan Dog’s father, who was separated from the good half by a spell. He appears as a slender, middle-aged man with a moustache and a goatee. He was born in the seventeenth century, in a time line previous to the main one and told in other issues of the comic book.

•Morgana, a beautiful woman with long black hair, is Dylan Dog’s mother and wife of Xabaras, with whom she shares a similar narrative origin in the series’ seventeenth-century time line. Dylan falls in love with her, not knowing she is his mother, and becomes victim of a typical Oedipus conflict, which is intensified by the mystical nature of their relationship.

Artistic Style

The graphic style of Dylan Dog is, overall, a naturalistic one: Characters and objects are drawn in a realistic fashion. The series makes use of black-and-white drawings, with rare halftones and textures and a wide presence of strong dark/bright contrasts. The artists who have participated in Dylan Dog are many; despite that, they all follow the general rules of the series’ graphical bible (basic appearances for the characters and settings). However, each one has his or her own graphic idiolect. The artistic contributors worth mentioning are Angelo Stano, Fabio Celoni, Brindisi, Carlo Ambrosini, Giampiero Casertano, Giovanni Freghieri, Marco Soldi, Massimo Carnevale, and Nicola Mari. The most appreciated is Stano, whose style, characterized by an elegant brushwork, is reminiscent of Egon Schiele’s figures. Beginning with issue 42 of the Italian series, Stano was also the cover artist, following Claudio Villa (issues 1-41), whose style was elegant but judged by readers to be too vigorous and bright for Dylan Dog. Among the other artists, Celoni is much esteemed. His sensibility for horror themes makes him a perceptive interpreter of Dylan Dog’s shadowy settings.

The layout of Dylan Dog’s average page is based on three strips of 2/3 panels each; panels are usually rectangular, following a classic pattern of Italian comic books. In the original edition, lettering was handmade; in the American edition it is computer generated with an aseptic style, which creates a dystonia with the art. Bubbles usually have customary shapes and dialogue is an important part of the story, as it often is in Italian comics. Dialogue, however, is rendered without verbosity, being verbal texts well proportioned within the panels, accurately counterbalanced by action scenes almost free from speech balloons, and occasionally accompanied, instead, by visual onomatopoeias that render well the frightening mood of the horror sequences.

Themes

At first glance, the overall structure of the series is quite simple: Dylan Dog is a melancholic and lonely London private detective who investigates paranormal and supernatural activities with the help of a funny sidekick. However, the series does not belong to the crime-fiction genre, since it is only mildly based on detection and deals fully with the horror genre. As it is easily deducible from the plots and the characters’ features, the big themes of Dylan Dog deal with fantasy/horror clichés—vampires, werewolves, zombies, demons, witches, and myriad forms of psychopaths and killers—and, on the other hand, the supernatural, including motifs such as ghosts, alternate dimensions, and the afterlife. However, the writers, especially Sclavi, also convey more mature issues: At a deeper level, Dylan Dog is a commentary on people and societies, life’s ups and downs, and sensitive issues such as alcoholism, drug addiction, grief, violence, love, otherness, personal commitment, and disability.

As a further element of interest, Dylan Dog is a cultured comic book that makes references to high and popular culture, including philosophy, history, psychology, literature, theater, cinema, music, and television. Virtually every story of the series is based on this triple structure: horror or supernatural plot, social commentary, and cultural quotations; in several Dylan Dog monthly adventures, many details on the protagonist’s personal history are gradually revealed. Therefore, the attention level, the emotional participation, and the approval from readers are constantly high, as sales figures have shown since the series was first published.

Impact

Dylan Dog’s impact on the U.S. comics market and public, first as a short seven-issue series and a separate one-shot book, then as an omnibus paperback volume, is, overall, nonessential for two main reasons. First, the United States has a weak tradition in importing and translating European comics; this is deducible from the way that Dark Horse Comics has treated its Dylan Dog publication rights—only seven translated stories from twenty-five years of serial publication (the Italian version has about three hundred issues) plus a number of special books and reprints. Second, Dylan Dog’s format and genre are quite different from both average American comic books and manga, therefore its popularity is rather limited and restricted to a small section of the comics fandom.

The editorial behavior of Dark Horse Comics has not helped Dylan Dog in the United States. Opinions among American critics and fans have frequently underlined the debatable choice of the Dylan Dog stories included in the omnibus, and the absence of any context to introduce the work to American readers has hindered its success in the United States. However, the series and the overall level of the stories published in the United States have been generally appreciated by American readers and critics, precisely because Dylan Dog is different from superhero comic books.

Dylan Dog has been defined as a mix between Tales from the Crypt (1950’s) and the narrative moods of filmmaker David Lynch. Another important reason why the series has been accepted by American readers and critics is the relatively low price of the omnibus edition. Dylan Dog’s acceptance in the United States is an ongoing process. The film Dylan Dog: Dead of Night (2011) has partially stimulated a renewed interest in the comics series; the respectable revenue of the movie at the box office, despite the many differences from the original comic book’s characters and narrative mood, was fairly promising.

Films

Cemetery Man. Directed by Michele Soavi. Audifilm, 1994. Starring Rupert Everett as Francesco Dellamorte. Orginally titled Dellamorte Dellamore in Italian, the film transposes a novel by Sclavi and is reminiscent of Dylan Dog. A cemetery guardian discovers that corpses resurrect as zombies. Everett had already been an inspiration for Sclavi for the look of the character of Dylan Dog. Cemetery Man does have connections with Dylan Dog: Dellamorte is mentioned by Dylan in Dylan Dog’s Italian edition (issues 94 and 205) and appears in two other adventures starring Dylan Dog: special album, issue 3, and a short story, “When the Stars Fall.”

Dylan Dog: Dead of Night. Directed by Kevin Munroe. Hide Park Film, 2011. Starring Brandon Routh as Dylan Dog and Sam Huntington as Marcus. Reception has been negative among fans and critics. Marcus is a surrogate of Felix. The white Volkswagen Beetle (Dylan’s car) has been changed into a black one, due to copyright issues. In the movie version, Dylan is a superficial, muscular hero, while in the comic book he is an emaciated and melancholic antihero. The film is set in New Orleans instead of London.

Radio Series

Dylan Dog: Jack lo squartatore. Directed by Armando Traverso. Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI), 2002. Audio story with twenty episodes, produced by RAI, the Italian public radio company, and broadcast on RAI Radio 2. Music by Luigi Seviroli. Starring Francesco Prando as Dylan Dog and Mino Caprio as Groucho. This is the first radio show of Dylan Dog and introduces the characters. In English the title translates to “Dylan Dog: Jack the Ripper.” It was not the first time that an Italian comic book was transposed into a radio series: Tex and Diabolik (first published in 1962) had already been adapted into “audiocomics” by RAI.

Dylan Dog: Necropolis. Directed by Armando Traverso. Radiotelevisione Italiana, 2004. Four-episode audio story broadcast on RAI Radio 2. Music by Seviroli. Starring Prando as Dylan Dog and Caprio as Groucho. Necropolis was originally published as a story in issue 212 of the original series, by writer Paola Barbato and artist Freghieri. In the plot, following a miscarriage of justice, Dylan Dog is taken into a prison, where every single movement of the convicts is guarded and recorded by a sort of “Big Brother.”

Dylan Dog: L’uccisore di streghe. Directed by Armando Traverso. Radiotelevisione Italiana, 2004. Six-episode audio story broadcast on RAI Radio. Music by Seviroli. Starring Prando and Caprio. Translated in English as “Dylan Dog: The Witch-Killer,” L’uccisore di streghe was originally published in issue 213, by writer Pasquale Ruju and artist Pietro Dall’Agnol. Dylan Dog falls in love with Angelique, a beautiful witch from Beauport, but a mysterious witch killer makes an attempt on her life.

Further Reading

Kirkman, Robert, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard. The Walking Dead (2004- ).

Mignola, Mike. Hellboy (1993).

Moore, Alan, and Eddie Campbell. From Hell (1989-1996).

Niles, Steve, and Ben Templesmith. 30 Days of Night (2002).

Bibliography

D’Arcangelo, Adele, and Federico Zanettin. “Dylan Dog Goes to the USA: A North-American Translation of an Italian Comic Book Series.” Across Languages and Cultures 5, no. 2 (October, 2004): 187-210.

Froehlich, Thomas. “My Name Is Dog...Dylan Dog!” Translated by Binu Starnegg. Evolver Die Netzzeitschrift, April 7, 2008. http://www.evolver.at/reloaded/Dylan‗Dog‗Tiziano‗Sclavi‗Comic.

Ho, Oliver. “Dylan Dog Versus Hellboy: A Study of Pulp and Pop Pastiche.” Pop Matters, August 26, 2009. http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/109764-dylan-dog-vs.-hellboy-a-study-of-pulp-and-pop-pastiche.

Sclavi, Tiziano. “Dylan Dog FAQ: Tiziano Sclavi Replies to Your Questions.” Sergio Bonelli Editore. http://www-en.sergiobonellieditore.it/dylan/servizi/faq.html.

White, Bryan. “The Android’s Dungeons: Dylan Dog Case Files.” Cinema Suicide, May 5, 2009. http://www.cinema-suicide.com/2009/05/05/the-androids-dungeon-dylan-dog-case-files.