A tribute to Dylan Dog

And when night, darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons of Belial, flown with insolence and wine. (J. Milton)

From out of Italy comes this comic book featuring a rather bizarrely named London private eye, DYLAN DOG. And it isn't just his name that's rather peculiar. For Dylan specializes in the strange and inexplicable world of the supernatural and occult. Accompanied by his trusty sidekick / assistant / butler, Groucho (who seems to be the ghost or at least the reincarnation of a rather famous comedian: Groucho Marx), Dylan looks into some pretty squirrelly business, often involving werewolves, vampires, ghosts and all sorts of demons and devils of our time and age–he is a penniless nightmare investigator who defies the whole preceding horror tradition with a vein of surrealism and an anti-bourgeois rhetoric: the true monsters in many of these stories are human beings–all while using simple detective work to crack cases. He's also an endless romantic, regularly interrupting investigations for a nostalgic horror film d’essai or very simply for a date, during which he will undauntedly fall desperately in love.

Created in October 1986 by Tiziano Sclavi, Dylan Dog, is a comic book character shaped for Sergio Bonelli Publishing. Dylan Dog is the most celebrated protagonist of an Italian horror series. In this case, though, "horror" is a limiting definition: in actual fact, Dylan Dog's adventures have always alternated traditional horror with numerous "tributes" to the classical monsters (Frankenstein, the Werewolf, Dracula and many others), with a passing nod to the modern splatter of movies by Dario Argento and George Romero as well. There are also numerous references to the surreal and the fantastic, but always with a pronounced vein of irony, so that over the years the series has evolved into a sort of sophisticated horror comedy. By virtue of this special blend of ingredients, Dylan Dog has undergone a constant development, - slowly at first and then gathering pace until it exploded into a veritable cult phenomenon, becoming the most widely sold comic strip in Italy: it has achieved over a million copies a month, considering both previously unpublished stories and reprints*.

* Sergio Bonelli Editore