Here's "something for the weekend": this essay in three parts was originally written for a publication that never came out. Since this year Italian comic Diabolik is celebrating its 50th anniversary, I'm republishing it on Irenebrination in three parts, from today until Sunday. Enjoy.
I. Diabolik, a Dark Family Affair
"Diabolik is a perfect Pop Art icon. I think that, if Roy Lichtenstein were alive, he would definitely do a series of paintings that featured Diabolik, in the same way as Jeff Koons recently did the 'Popeye Series'," Vincenzo Mollica (interviewed for Dazed Digital).
Between the end of the ‘50s and the early ‘60s, Italy went through a profound transformation on a financial, industrial and social level.
The demand for new products, from typing machines and consumer goods to cars and scooters, ensured the country quickly forgot about its agricultural past to embrace the industrial future.
The economic boom radically and dramatically changed many cities: every month thousands of immigrants moved from the poorer South to the richer North.
During this period of time, Milan quickly expanded: from the early morning lights, among the fog, rain and smog, busy trams and crowded trains carried hundreds of office and factory workers to their jobs.
The Sixties had opened with an extraordinary season for Italian cinema with masterpieces such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s elegantly existential The Night (La notte, 1960) and Federico Fellini’s hedonistic La Dolce Vita (1960).
But Milan’s general mood and atmosphere evoked scenes from Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli, 1960), a tragic story of migration, or the descriptions in Luciano Bianciardi’s novel La vita agra (It’s a Hard Life, 1962), a dark and bitter interpretation of the economic miracle and an attack against capitalism and the dehumanising effects of consumer society.
It was in this climate that a controversial publication arrived at the newsagents on a cold November morning. Entitled Diabolik and published in pocket size, it resembled an ordinary comic book.
Yet its bright red logo, subtitle spelling “Il fumetto del brivido” (The comic book of terror) and transgressive cover with the image of a masked man in the background and a woman screaming in the foreground, highlighted that the publication was aimed at an audience of grown-ups, something rather unique for those times when comics were considered as light entertainment for kids. Grown-ups preferred indeed noir novels, known in Italy as “gialli” (thrillers - in Italian the term "giallo" literally means "yellow", but it’s also used to describe crime, thriller and noir novels).
One of the most successful examples was the novel Uccidevano di notte (They Killed by Night, 1957) by journalist Italo Fasan.
The book told the story of a terminally ill actor who turned into a serial killer and announced his murders by sending letters signed “Diabolic” to the press and the police.
Behind Diabolik there was a 40-year-old woman, Angela Giussani. Born in Milan from a middle-class family, since her wedding to Gino Sansoni in 1947, Angela had worked first for her husband’s advertising agency as a model, appearing in popular adverts for Ducati radios and Bemberg fabrics.
When Sansoni founded the Astoria publishing house, Angela became a secretary, editor and again model for some of her husband’s early releases such as manuals for housewives. But Angela was a rather unusual housewife for those times: she excelled in sports, owned a licence to drive and a private pilot licence.
In 1961 Angela founded the Astorina publishing house and, soon after, also her younger sister Luciana, started working with her. The first Astorina products were limited to board and card games with themes such as Western stories and soccer and to the Italian translation of American comic Big Ben Bolt by Elliot Caplin with illustrations by John Cullen Murphy.
Angela got the inspiration for Diabolik while watching hundreds of commuters travelling to and from Milan everyday to reach their jobs. She imagined a magazine they could have read during their trips, maybe something easy to carry, entertaining yet intriguing, with breathtaking action.
Inspired by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s character Fantômas, the “Lord of Terror”, Angela came up with an idea: a handsome masked criminal, a cruel thief and killer who always managed to escape justice, in a nutshell a strong anti-hero for grown-ups of both sexes. Once nailed the protagonist of their stories, Angela and Luciana came up with two names that somehow evoked the essence of their new character: “Diabolicus” or “Diabolik”, a sort of mix between the name of the killer in Fasan’s novel and the name “Diabolo”.
The final choice fell on the name with the “K” due to its greater impact. The sisters launched in this way a trend, since, from then on, all the main characters of Italian noir comics featured the “K” letter in their names.
The first issue of Diabolik came out on 1st November 1962: the story focused on a criminal with the eyes and hairstyle of Angela’s favourite actor, Robert Taylor, living under the name of Walter Dorian in the fictitious town of Clerville, near Marseille.
Clad in a black bodysuit and wearing a mask, Diabolik stole and killed, always managing to escape the law and the traps set by Detective Inspector Ginko, his rival (the name came from Angela’s husband, Gino, with a K added; Ginko’s girlfriend in the comic book is Altea, a character inspired by French actress Germaine Lefebvre, better known as Capucine).
When it first came out, Diabolik was characterised by rather poor illustrations, yet its plot was fascinating. Though the sales of the first issue weren’t encouraging, Angela and Luciana had confidence in their new character and called illustrator Gino Marchesi to work on the second and third issue.
Marchesi also developed the Lady Kant character, later on known as Eva Kant, who became Diabolik’s partner. Eva’s facial features were inspired by Grace Kelly, but her hairstyle was borrowed from Marchesi’s wife.
The third issue of the comic book, published in 1963, was seized by the authorities for being too violent, yet Angela kept on working on the new publication with her indefatigable sister, developing new stories and signing them simply as “A. and L. Giussani”, fearing readers wouldn’t have trusted a comic book written by two women.
When Diabolik reached the seventh issue, sales finally increased and, in December 1963, the sisters realised their comic had struck the collective imagination. The comic was successful for three main reasons: its practical format, its controversial protagonist and its readership who saw their new anti-hero as an incarnation of their deepest fantasies.
The narration was also vitally important and Angela and Luciana often turned to their own general practitioner to ask about poisoning, wounding, killing or committing the perfect murder without living any traces, hosting meetings with their collaborators to try and come up with fantastically amazing weapons and gadgets that Diabolik could have used in his adventures.
The characters’ faces, their clothes and the environments surrounding them - as well as the lettering and a precise use of the halftone screens - also became instrumental to make sure the story looked and sounded more real, while a striking cover, was the key to attract the readers’ attention.
Diabolik became an irresistible temptation for Italian readers who seemed to love his modus operandi: this anti-hero could do practically everything clad in his black suit or wearing special masks that reproduced the features of other people.
He killed with a knife and poisoned with lethal needles, escaped the police and lived a fantastically unthinkable life in secret hides with a beautiful partner.
The comic book spawned an entirely new genre suspended between thriller, horror and noir that mainly featured masked anti-heroes as main characters, such as Max Bunker’s Kriminal and Satanik.
The former was a sadistic killer clad in a yellow and black costume with a skeleton mask; the latter was instead a woman, a talented biologist who, disfigured by a birthmark on her face, discovered a miraculous formula that transformed her into a beautiful woman, and started carrying out horrendous deeds, killing as many people as possible (her family included…) and sexually exploiting all the men she met.
Both Kriminal and Satanik featured violence and sex scenes, but Satanik was considered as more dangerous since it represented everything that society wanted to repress, mainly women's sexual power.
The motto of Catholic weekly Il Vittorioso was “healthy, strong, honest and kind”, but readers had started favouring very different kind of heroes who lived electrifyingly forbidden adventures.
The dark and violent atmospheres that characterised these publications sparked a debate about the damages to morality that these anti-heroes and their adventures were causing.
In 1965, La Domenica del Corriere featured a story about a Milanese man who dressed up as Diabolik to frighten his wife who neglected her home duties and spent most of her time reading noir comics.
A month after, a young woman from Sicily poisoned her husband inspired, a magazine claimed, by the dark comics she read and in particular by Diabolik.
The Catholic press launched a crusade against immoral publications, accusing comics to mine the conscience of young readers with violent stories about thieves and juvenile delinquents, claiming they were responsible for the murders, kidnappings, robberies and assorted criminal acts happening all over Italy.
The censors’ opinions seemed to be very similar to the theories about the relationship between comic books and juvenile delinquents featured in Dr. Fredric Wertham’s 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent.
Besides, Diabolik and Eva Kant’s relationship became a problem for prissy moralists: the protagonists of the Giussani sisters’ comic weren’t married and they had chosen not to have kids. Eva also had a mysterious past and was a very independent woman with a passion for driving Mini Minors and Jaguars.
In later years Eva turned into an icon of elegance, class and femininity, a symbol of the emancipated woman and Cosmopolitan published eight stories about her between 1975 and 1976 (while she became the testimonial for a lingerie line in 1998, turning into a ‘comic book top model’; when the character turned 40, in 2003, many Italian magazines dedicated her celebratory covers).
Despite the harsh criticisms, the passion for dark stories quickly spread: as sales raised, Diabolik spawned a series of imitation, including dark and violent photo stories such as Killing and pornographic magazine Erotik.
In the mid-‘60s there were roughly over fifty noir and thriller titles in Italy, most of them released by independent publishing houses. One million noir stories were published and bought every month: their sales were higher than “gialli” novels.
See you tomorrow for the second part of the essay.
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