The legendary one hundred and fifty numbers of Dylan Dog. The phrase ‹‹the first hundred and fifty issues of Dylan Dog were the best››, said by many readers or former readers of the character, is often quoted to refute it, stating that even more recent stories (the series has exceeded four hundred issues, not counting specials or spin-off series) are quite good, yet the “street reader” often possesses a greater awareness than that of so many so-called critics and pundits.
The first one hundred and fifty numbers of Dylan Dog, i.e. roughly from the mid-eighties (the character made his debut in 1986) to the end of the nineties, coincide with the best period from a creative point of view for its creator, the screenwriter Tiziano Sclavi, who on 3 April turns seventy (he was born in 1953).
In those years he created the character and wrote most of the stories, but he was also very active outside Dylan.
‹‹Dylan Dog: Black Horror›› has just arrived in bookstores, a volume that collects three of the first four specials of the so-called Indagatore dell’Incubo, originally released between 1987 and 1990, drawn by series columns such as Corrado Roi and Giovanni Freghieri and who clearly testify to Sclavi’s narrative happiness of the time, whether he tells dark stories set on Loch Ness or adapts his own novel ‹‹Dellamorte Dellamore›› into comics (with the screenwriter Luigi Mignacco) by bringing the character of the caretaker of a cemetery in Val Padana, Francesco Dellamorte infested by zombies with the Londoner Dylan Dog.
A few years later, in 1994, the director Michele Soavi adapted ‹‹Dellamorte Dellamore›› in the homonymous film starring Rupert Everett (the actor who inspired Dylan Dog’s face) and a beautiful Anna Falchi, a film in the wake of the so-called “Gotico Padano” by Pupi Avati (‹‹The house with laughing windows››, ‹‹Zeder››,) and truly Sclavian.
The volume is missing the 1988 special, ‹‹The horrors of Altroquando››, another masterpiece, because it was already present in a bookshop edition. This time the drawings are by a true master of comics, Attilio Micheluzzi, with whom Sclavi created the ‹‹Roy Mann›› saga from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, a postmodern homage to 1930s comics. The protagonist (Roy Mann, in fact) is a comic book writer who is thrown into a parallel dimension due to the explosion of a defective coffee maker. A story between irony and madness (clouds of cotton wool, tourist spaceships and Chinese speaking Neapolitan on a flying scooter) which shows the perfect harmony between the two great authors despite the age difference (Micheluzzi is over twenty years older than Sclavi ) and of political views (Sclavi is very leftist, Micheluzzi is an old liberal).
In the same years Sclavi wrote an important saga of Zagor, ‹‹The return of Hellingen›› (1988), drawn by the graphic creator of the character, Gallieno Ferri (while the other creator was the same publisher Sergio Bonelli).
Zagor, the avenger of the Darkwood forest in early 19th century America, is Bonelli’s character closest to a superhero and the long story (over five hundred pages) is not so much another battle with her arch-nemesis mad scientist (Hellingen, precisely ), but rather a sort of reinterpretation of the character in the style of what was happening at the time for superheroes, as in Frank Miller’s Batman or in ‹‹Watchmen›› by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
In 1996 and 1998 he published respectively ‹‹The labels on the shirts›› and ‹‹Nothing happened››, largely autobiographical novels in which there are three versions of himself: Tiz, successful screenwriter, Tom, depressed alcoholic and in a creative crisis, and Cohan, who represents the Sclavi of the time, pacified but who hardly writes anymore.
At the end of the decade, in fact, the “real” Sclavi greatly reduces his literary activity, in the last twenty years only six of his Dylan Dog issues have come out, a novel, a graphic novel and a miniseries set in the universe of the Investigator of the ‘Nightmare, ‹‹Tomorrow’s Tales››.
Furthermore, again at the end of the 1990s, ‹‹Dylan Dog Indocile feelings, arcane fears›› was released, recently republished, with additions, by the Odoya publishing house: edited by the screenwriter (also of Dylan Dog) Alberto Ostini.
It is a collection of essays on the character and on horror with the conversation between Sclavi and Umberto Eco as a treat, the famous Alexandrian scholar and novelist who had repeatedly claimed to be a passionate reader of the character. A volume that takes stock of the character and comes out at a turning point in Sclavi’s career.
The “street reader was right: the period between the mid-eighties and the end of the nineties was not only the Golden Age of Dylan Dog but also, if not above all, of Tiziano Sclavi as a writer.