We've heard some good news about comic book movies recently, with Joss Whedon adapting The Avengers and the Scott Pilgrim movie not sucking at all and such. Me, I won't be able to watch Scott Pilgrim for quite a while because it opens pretty late in Germany (January! What's the excuse for that?!), so let me take a look at another new comic book adaptation I haven't seen.
A couple of days ago, a trailer for the upcoming Dylan Dog movie, Dead of Night, hit the nets. The movie is supposed to open around Halloween, but I've heard that they've postponed it until 2011, so don't hold your breath. I originally meant to share the trailer here, but as it turns out, it wasn't an official release, just something they cranked out for "the International sales folks". That's good news, because the trailer sucked big time. I'm not getting into the lousy special effects here because a) they've fixed them since, and b) I like them trashy. What irritated me was that the movie didn't resemble the comics at all. (Now that isn't exactly newsworthy either – anybody who's seen, say, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Constantine will have noticed a pattern long ago.)
Let's take a look at the comic instead. Unless you're Italian, you may not be too familiar with it. In Italy, it's one of the best-selling comic books ever. In the United States, Dark Horse issued seven stories, recently collected into a 700-page collection.
Dylan Dog is a paranormal investigator who claims he doesn't believe in the supernatural, but is open to anything. He lives with his sidekick Groucho who may or may not be the resurrected Groucho Marx, though he surely behaves that way, testing everybody's patience by constantly cracking jokes. Dylan has a sense of humor, too, but he is more of a darker, moody nature. His fascination with the supernatural seems to stem from his conviction that the natural world doesn't make much sense either. He's an ex-cop, a recovered alcoholic, and he constantly falls in love with his female clients, which is usually doomed from the beginning.
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Another trip in the webcomic wayback machine:
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