Ancona, 5 May 2024 – ‘Dylan Dog’ it is perhaps the best Italian serial comic which continues to resist on the market, therefore becoming its designer, as happened to the 45-year-old from Ancona Andrea Fattori, is the consecration for a cartoonist. He also confirms it: “In a certain sense it is like this”, but immediately afterwards he hedges: “even if the impact on society is less than the 1990s and 2000s; serial comics generally suffer from the same crisis as all of publishing Furthermore, many readers have moved to manga, perhaps because Japanese publishers are better at intercepting new tastes.”
This is not false modesty, but the realism and humility of the great. Moreover, Fattori does not hide his feelings proud to have published his first story on Dyaln Dog in the same issue as the last one written by a great master of Italian comics like Carlo Ambrosini, who died last year. The two stories, in fact, follow one another in issue 24 of “Dylan Dog Oldboy”, released in April. In addition to the panels written by Alessandro Russo and drawn by Fattori, entitled “The Lobster’s Dilemma”, the reader will also find “Mutant Souls”, the last Dylan story written and drawn by Ambrosini. What unites them is the theme of metamorphosis.
For those who don’t know “Dylan Dog”, it is a comic published by Sergio Bonelli Editor since 1986, and second in sales only to “Tex”. The protagonist is a “nightmare investigator”. Quintessence of modern art, poised between triviality and absolute, it is a genre work, but one that crosses genres, from detective stories to horror, from realism to fantasy. Fattori has liked it since he was a reader of the series. “I appreciated the sensitivity with which the character was written – he explains – how the monsters were treated, reversing points of view. There was a mix of poetry and horror, where terror was never an end in itself, but served to tell the story of human weaknesses. The graphic sector was also very notable, from Claudio Villa to Angelo Stano, from Piero Dall’Agnol and Nicola Mari to Ambrosini himself”.
As has arrived, therefore, our Factors to be sixth among such… sign? After making his debut as a cartoonist twenty years ago with the inks of “Italian Mambo”, he arrived at Star Comics in 2007 with the drawings of “Jonathan Steele”, then he joined Bonelli drawing issue 66 of “Brendon” in 2009. He began dealing with the nightmare detective in 2019, drawing issues 3 and 4 of “Morgan Lost & Dylan Dog”. It was just a taste, though. Only this year, in fact, was he able to draw a story dedicated exclusively to the romantic and ironic investigator, created by the writer and screenwriter Tiziano Scalvi. Style icon, with his black jacket, on a red shirt with undone cuffs and outside his blue jeans, the nightmare investigator, revolver in hand, faces the monsters that from Dracula and Frankenstein onwards have never stopped infesting our imagination.
