Reviewsarama

I was born and raised in Italy, and I started reading comics in 1990, when a classmate lent me an issue of Dylan Dog, a very popular italian comic. Before then I would read the occasional Disney comics I found in various places, like the doctor’s waiting room, or from friends: Topolino (Mickey Mouse), Paperino (Donald Duck) etc…

But Dylan Dog was the first adult comic I ever read. It is a horror series, where the star is a private detective/ex-cop who finds himself involved in paranormal events.

As the majority of italian comics, each issue is a self-contained story, so anyone can pick up a random issue and enjoy the 98 pages long black & white story. Some characters appear more than once, but you don’t need to read previous stories at all. Writers and Artists vary for each issue,.

I started buying DD by myself, and I also looked for the back issues. Once I was all caught up, I started looking for other series to buy. Naturally I first looked at comics published by the same company, Bonelli Editore. This is the most popular comics publisher after Disney Italia, and they have almost 20 monthly series.

After DD, I started buying the following series:

Zagor: an adventure story in the old American frontier in the first half of the last century. Zagor fights to maintain peace, protect the Indian tribes and hunt down criminals.

This series was a lot of fun,  there was plenty of adventure and environmentally friendly stories. Lots of humor as well, thanks to Zagor’s sidekick with a very long Spanish name I can’t remember.

I found a huge stack of back issues one day and enjoyed them all. Then also continued to buy the new issues up to a certain point. I still enjoyed it but I had to cut some series to make room for the new American comics.

Martin Mystere: before the Da Vinci Code, there was MM. A great blend of history, adventure, mistery. I really enjoyed this comic, even though I do not like history in general. But these stories really bring out the most fascinating aspect of history. It’s never boring or scholastic, even though the history feels pretty accurate, I am sure the writers make a lot of research for their stories.

But there’s also a lot of action adventure and plenty of investigations into historical mysteries. There are obviously fantastic elements to this series, not everything is real, even though the basis for the stories is real.

The format of the stories is not a clean story for each issue, the length of a story is dictated by the subject itself, so sometimes in one issue we get the conclusion to one story and the beginning of another one. Sometimes we just get the middle of a long story. I found this frustrating on one hand, because you don’t always get a full story, but on the other hand this is good for the quality of the story.

Tex: the longest running series, a classic western. I enjoyed these stories, they felt really like an epic western. I remeber when my brother and I decided to start buying this series, he went out with his bike to the newstand to get whatevet he could find about Tex. When he came back, he had a huge stack of comics with him, enough to last us a few weeks.

These stories were very long epic stories, reading them I always felt like I was immersing myself into an epic journey full of deserts and horses. I loved some of the specials they printed with one very long story of 3-400 pages in one volume. Those were great summer reads.

Nathan Never: probably the favorite of mine, this is a sci-fi series which my brother collected from the start. Great sci-fi stories, great art, and most importantly there was an overall story. The overall timeline of this future world had been mapped out from the beginning, and the misterious past of the star was also conceived from the start. These back stories were revealed little by little throughout the single stories, and sometimes there was an entire issue dedicated to the overall myth.

I stopped buying italian comics after a few years, not because I lost interest, but because there were new comics to explore (superheroes, manga etc…). The good thing about these comics is that if I felt like reading them, I could buy a new issue off the rack and enjoy it (which cannot be done with superhero comics). The bad is that after a while you keep reading the same type of story every month, and it gets a little bit boring.