Dylan Dog Color Fest 1

Sergio Bonelli's editorial for Dylan Dog, Color Fest 1, published in August 2007, highlights it as the start of a new direction, the original creator Tiziano Sclavi stepping back from writing duties and giving other writers and artists - some new, some familiar with the character of Dylan Dog - some fresh new ideas and interpretations. And that's what we get in a great variety of styles and artwork in the first Color Fest, a 130 page issue containing four new stories, some of which work well, others not so much, but all very definitely in the established character of the London based Investigator of Nightmares and his sidekick Groucho.

Dylan in Wonderland

Story, script - Giovanni Gualdoni
Art - Bruno Brindisi

The opening story in the collection is a simple one that nonetheless operates on different levels, as you would expect to be the case of someone who often delves into the dark places between this reality and the one of nightmares. This childhood nightmare takes place in a land of wonder, where the young Dylan learns to put aside his scepticism and believe in dreams through an encounter with a young neighbouring girl called Alice. The land of wonders that she leads him into inevitably takes on a darker character, as they experience some terrifying things and encounter a shadow 'uomo nero'. It's a land where the adult Dylan still confronts a significant experience from his childhood. Alice's fate in the magical land is mirrored in reality, where she has been stung by a bee and is allergic to its venom.

The land of wonders is an abandoned fairground that is seen as a magical through the eyes of the children, but it is filled with hazards. It's a clever script by Giovanni Gualdoni that navigates the childhood view of the world with a darker reality and it's illustrated very simply, like a children's storybook by Bruno Brindisi.

Fuori tempo massimo
Story Roberto Recchione
Art Massimo Carnevale

Fuori tempo massimo is written and illustrated more in the American tradition, but in the spirit of Dylan Dog, where self-referential meta-narratives are a familiar feature, it's done in a knowing way. In that tradition, the story presents an old adversary of Dylan’s, Axel Neil (although I'm not aware that this character actually appeared in any previously published story). Axel is an axe-wielding homicidal maniac, one of many that plagued the investigator before he took him down, and even then it needed the help of the armed forces. They couldn't keep this bad boy down however. He has emerged from a coma and looks like taking up his old habits again. “Welcome to my nightmare”, he proclaims, “I'm in need of some bad medicine”, “You're the sickness, I'm the cure” and “You've chosen a good time to die”.

As the dialogue hints, Fuori tempo massimo is a throwback to the splatter movies of the 1980s, and as such, Dylan succeeds here by convincing Axel that he is out of touch, has been gone too long, things have changed and the world (and word of comics) has no time for his corny catchphrases. There is a pertinent observation that the world now has more horrors than a chainsaw wielding maniac on the loose. “Have you heard of weapons of mass destruction?” The artwork by Massimo Carnevale is great, fully up to the nature and character of the story, reminding me of classic Norm Breyfogle Batman from the 90s, albeit keeping rigidly within the traditional panel format here, but dynamic enough within that.

L’accapalappiasogni

Script - Tito Faraci
Art - Davide Gianfelice

There is a little bit of humour and light-heartedness in L’accapalappiasogni, the Dreamcatcher, but as ever there is also a bit of a dark side. The humour of course comes initially from Groucho, relating in storyteller fashion how Dylan passes his time fighting monsters and vampires, how a curse prevents him from dating a beautiful woman for longer than a month (and just coincidentally Dylan Dog is published every month, so a new woman every issue!). During one of the investigator's slow periods Dylan meets an old colleague from Scotland Yard at a pub who has a little job for him. His son's dog Baldo has gone missing. Finding lost pets is not really in Dylan's area of expertise, but what's strange about this one is that the dog was an imaginary one.

Fortunately, while not quite the kind of case that he usually takes on as the Investigator of Nightmares, Dylan is capable of delving into the world of a child's imagination. He used to be one himself, and so apparently did Groucho to judge by the conclusion. And, evidently, so too once were the creators of this story Davide Gianfelice's angular illustrations remind me a little of Cyril Pedrosa, clear lined, bold and cartoony, dynamic in line with the imaginative children's world character of the story created by Tito Faraci.

Il vampiro dei colori
Script - Giovanni Di Gregoria
Art - Giampiero Casterano

To give away the ending somewhat - but it would depend on how well you know your Woody Allen - Il vampiro dei colori, The Vampire in Colour, owes something to The Purple Rose of Cairo, although being Dylan Dog evidently it’s more of a tribute to classic horror cinema and perhaps the greatest of them all, Murnau’s Nosferatu. Trying to find a point between warm romance and cold horror doesn’t quite work, nor does the artwork strike the right note for me here. Ironically, the full-colour story, which is essential to the point of the story, doesn’t work well alongside the work it is paying tribute to, but it's nice to see the Prince Charles cinema in London get a namecheck and reference.

Reading notes: Dylan Dog Colour Fest 1, published August 2007.