Dylan Dog 454 bis, Orrore tra i ghiacci

Dylan Dog is a comic series - a fumetto in Italian - that has been running in Italy since 1986. Originally created by Tiziano Sclavi, it is still published monthly with additional specials, collections and colour editions. With each book running to almost 100 pages, some double that length, there are evidently different artist and writer teams needed which helps keeps the character and the series fresh with ideas and approaches. Published in digest format - a little like the Commando books that I used to read as a child - if not for Dark Horse publishing a few selected books in this and the Martin Mystery series in the same format in the 90s, Dylan Dog would probably remain largely unknown outside of Italy and some European countries where some of the books are translated. Those US translations featured new covers by Mike Mignola, appropriately since Dylan Dog is an investigator of the paranormal, or rather one who seems to attract all manner of horrors.

Dylan Dog indeed describes himself in Dylan Dog #454 bis, Summer 2024 as “Sono un ricercatore, anzi, un indagatore… un esploratore dell’anima, un inguaribile romantico” ("I am a researcher, an investigator in fact ...an explorer of the soul, an incurable romantic"), which sums him up well, as does the title of the story "Orrore tra i ghiacci" (Horror within the Ice) reflect the kind of horror that is typical of a Dylan Dog adventure (in my limited experience), incorporating many familiar tropes and references of the genre (The Thing, Alien, Invasion of the Body Snatchers etc.) all the way back to Lovecraft. Less typical however is that this Dylan Dog adventure is not in a contemporary setting, but an alternative history tale from the turn of the 20th century, perhaps even something of an alternate origin story of how Dylan Dog came to have his power as an investigator of the occult.

An alien life form crashes its spaceship on a frozen region of Earth and remains trapped in the ice for a long time. Long enough for it to feel a great hunger. That hunger you can imagine is going to be sated when it is recovered from its icy tomb in 1899 by a Royal Geographical Society expedition team on the ship Outpost 1. When it escapes from the block of ice aboard the ship, the creature devours and assumes the form of its first victim, delving into his brain and memories. It turns out that its victim was the very crew member who argued for digging this horror out of the ice while others wanted to leave it where it was, and that crew member whose form the creature now inhabits, whose memories and manners it is able to assume and mimic is none other than the ship's Second Officer Dylan Dog.

Any other character in a comic book or in a genre horror fiction, never mind the title character, would find it hard to get out of this predicament. I mean you can cheat death, and Dylan has done it often, but when you are ripped apart and devoured by an alien creature you would think there is not much chance of coming back. Well, not for any other lead character maybe (not withstanding that there are some creative writers elsewhere), but Dylan Dog is another matter altogether. While the alien creature absorbs his appearance memories and character in a manner that even fools Grace, the lady scientist he is seeing on board, Dylan's personality is such that it starts to assert control over the alien lifeform that has effectively but ineffectively killed him. That places the Dylan Dog alien at odds with other more merciless crew members who have also had their bodies infected by the alien blood and taken over.

With a varied range of writers and artists, there is no such thing as a house style or consistency in the artwork of Dylan Dog adventures. Well, there is often a certain classic European style that is dominant in the black and white fumetti close to the original Tiziano Sclavi creation and Dylan Dog always closely resembles a young, lean Rupert Everett, but Silvia Califano's artwork here has a sketchy feel, with blotchy rather than deep blacks, and even solid blacks are occasionally washed to gray, giving it a misty, snowy historical character. Not rigidly sticking to standard square panels and with a creative use of angles, this gives the story a certain dynamism that fits the pace and tone of the story. It's superbly laid out, the horror of Bruno Enna's script brought fully to life.

Reading notes: Dylan Dog 454 bis, Orrore tra i ghiacci by Bruno Enna (writer) and Silvia Califano (art) is a 96-page complete story published in Italy by Sergio Bonelli Editore. It's the second of two books numbered 454, hence the 'bis', the vagaries of the numbering system and frequency of monthlies and specials remaining something of a mystery to me. I'd love to read more Dylan Dog or subscribe to the series but Sergio Bonelli don't ship outside of Italy, so I only ever manage to pick up the latest publications from newstand kiosks when I am on a trip to Italy, and I managed to pick up a couple of others this time. Maybe need to visit Italy more often.