Dylan Dog: 40 Years of the Nightmare Investigator

NÚCLEO CENTRAL

Créditos

Fábio Celoni

Created by Tiziano Sclavi in 1986, Dylan Dog transformed Italian horror comics and became a genuine icon of popular culture. The "Nightmare Investigator" redefined the horror genre by combining classic terror, psychological introspection and social criticism, winning over generation after generation of readers. More than monsters, what Dylan confronts is human frailty — fear, loneliness, madness — which makes each story unnervingly close to home. At forty, Dylan Dog is no mere nostalgic figure: he continues to open doors to new readers and to prove that nightmares, well told, never grow old.

This exhibition follows the character's evolution through original artwork by some of the most significant artists to have drawn him, showing the many faces of a figure who across forty years has lived through thousands of adventures — a number of which Portuguese readers have had the chance to discover over the past decade.

Tiziano Sclavi

Born in 1953, Tiziano Sclavi showed early on that he was a precocious writer. He won a literary prize at nineteen, though that official recognition of his talent did him little good: as he has put it, the public greeted his books with enthusiastic indifference. He was obliged to work as a journalist, proofreader and comics writer in order to make a living.

It was precisely as a writer of fumetti that Sclavi began his collaboration with the publisher Bonelli. He would write scripts for several of the house's other series before finally creating Dylan Dog, and with it the door to success, in the shape of the charismatic paranormal detective whose virtues have been praised even by Umberto Eco.

If Dylan Dog is a fascinating hero, his creator is no less so. A tormented figure, beset by depression and creative blocks that at one point drove him to attempt to take his own life, Sclavi is a man surrounded by an aura of mystery — one much helped along by the fact that he almost never appears in public, rarely gives interviews, and is photographed less often still. In one of those rare interviews he was asked whether he identified with Dylan Dog. His answer became famous: neither with Dylan nor with Groucho, he said — "I am the monsters."