A man called Marx (the best of the two:-) At page 11 of the n.1 (before Dylan,that appears only in the following page, and this is also an index of the character's importance) "The dawn of the living corpses" a moustached type with Groucho Marx's unforgettable face peeps out of the door and says "Yes"?. One of the few sensible strokes in his life in a comic strip. But he immediately makes up and he won't stay more. In the typical
Tiziano Sclavi's humorous style, based on puns, non-sense,calambours and wordy-oral plays and based on a comic priciple as the inversion of the expectations, the moustached type equal to Groucho Marx steals to the best of the Marx also the name and he becomes until from the beginning something more than a hilarious bonus in the interlacements. Sclavi guesses another of the saga's fundamental wedges during the construction: Groucho is just from immediately one of the motives to buy DD, for anyone quite THE motive, like well illustrates the "grouchist" cut of the letters to the editing. Groucho is not a character (about him we only know that he's a comic ex-actor and, from a little, that Dylan has met him during a demonstration), he is only a humorous function (sometimes narrative, for ex: when he saves Dylan), everybody knows that Groucho is not true, that it is another of Dylan Dog's magic, and it's ok. Even if his management has become a problem for the scriptwriters.
The other Dylan: Tiziano Sclavi... Sclavi is no doubt an author. Author in his creative meaning, as an artist transposing his personality in his own creations. If Dylan is a master's comic strip (with all the ambiguities of this definition),it is not because his tales are very nice, but because his inventor has marked his tales in a characteristic manner, and so these tales become immediately recognizable for style, thematic, rhythm, situations, characters. Tiziano Sclavi,as knows who briefly read his biography knows, rose from the ranks in Bonelli, working on other series. Zagor, Kerry the trapper and Mister No, above all. And quite in the Amazonian pilot Jerry Drake's tales he wrote, the stylistics choices he will express in Dylan are more evident. Dylan Dog's unloading in newspaper kiosk strikes the public with the power of a maul: winning ambient, but Sclavi's screen-plays are almost like jewels. A cinema and fizzy cut in the dialogues, big rhythm in cartoons direction, quotation's games that titillates experienced readers, explanations are abolished (it was 1986!) we can find these only in the internal monologues, nonsense rhymes hailing death taking many episodes in a painful crescendo, tender, eccentric or delirious characters, but always alive and never untidy, the courage to get down interlacements like Chinese boxes game ("Morgana" and "Tale of nobody").
...and his many magics. Dylan is not a series in continuity. The recurrent or occasional return of some characters is episodical. In the new number, each month, we find a tabula rasa about the previous events. Quite the debut's number is one of the few whose plot (even though in a dark manner) keeps on in the following histories, creating the familiar/oedipal mini-seam that finds a conclusion in the n.100. Dylan Dog's magic don't stays in this saga (little saga). The magic begins to gush out from Sclavi's pen soon, and it won't stay for years. "Ann Never's ghost", "Alpha and Omega," "Memories from the invisible", "Morgana", "After Midnight", "Gran Guignol", "Lost men's house", "The long goodbye", "Jonnhy Freak" (we also praise the good Mauro Marcheselli) these are masterpieces that enter the reader's heart and in the Italian comic strip's history. Other tales (not all by Sclavi) like "Goblin", "Shoot to the witches", "Doktor Terror", "Beyond the death", the recent decennial number drag social themes in the newspaper kiosk popular comic strip with overbearance and consecrates Dylan Dog like series that knows how to speak a language more powerful than that horror in which it could have been confined.
Past, present, future. For the old fans, the irreducibles one, for many of them Dylan has already died. Even if they still buy for habit or for collection this comic strip, they think Dylan has already given everything and today's one is a pale shade of the masterpiece it was. Who writes is not so drastic, even if a choice like Neil Gaiman's one for his Sandman (it finishes with the n.75, because the stimuli had finished) it would not have been as queer for a series like DD. It's clear that such an idea plays like a swearword to the publisher and certainly won't happen. The well to draw for the thematic of a comic strip like Dylan, is not undoubtedly without deep (in difference of other series like Zagor or Nathan Never, for example):too many situations (serial killer, deformed monsters, inversions good ones/bad ones, relationship life/ death/ not-life.) we have seen yet and they begin to stink of stale. Yet the character, the second leading actors, the possible ambient have so much charm so and so big potentiality to make us think to new tales of absolute value. Tales different in the cut, even without the "poetry" that has done the Dylan-myth, even less in the van and more rigorous, tales however to be read without prejudices. Under the nose already excellent tales like "Paper's jail" or "Until death doesn't separate you" have passed and many have shrug their's shoulders again. The doubt I rise is that, perhaps, not (or not only) the quality has fallen, but rather the ability to be astonished, to become enthusiastic of the readers once teen-agers, and now young men. When I was 17 years old I slobbered for things that I now see again with not few sufficiency ;-).
