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Other than a few words, I don't know any Italian: I dearly wish I did, however, when I'm confronted with three issues of the periodical
Dario Argento Presenta Profondo Rosso (Dario Argento Presents Deep Red), a black-and-white, horror-comics-anthology digest, circa 1991.[1] For those unfamiliar with his work, Dario Argento directs horror films and is best known for his color-saturated, violently hallucinatory
gialli from the '70s such as
Deep Red and
Suspiria (
giallo is an Italian thriller/mystery genre, known for its stylization, music and grand-guignol theatrics. It took its name from the yellow covers of pulp novels).
Freddy Krueger leers out from two of three covers of
Dario Argento Presents Deep Red (dapperly clad in a tuxedo for #4) and in ads for Argento's store that sells horror-themed merchandise (also named Profondo Rosso). Krueger even crosses over into the lead serial to protect
protagonist Stella Holmes (occult detective).[2] In general, he seems to be the anthology's mascot.
It is clear that many of the stories in the periodicals are based on or take from films in some way: some are straight-up adaptations of Hammer horror flicks, and others, such as "The Crimes of Edgar Allan Poe," written by N. Tulli and drawn by S. Muratori, seem to be riffing along the same lines as Argento's 1990 film
Two Evil Eyes. (I'm not sure how much licensing came into play for this, but the anthology's creators seemed to be able to merrily cherry-pick any horror character they would like to use from a variety of media.)
Many of the pieces are heavily EC-influenced in art and plotting and/or are DC horror comics reprints, by the likes of Gil Kane and Joe Orlando, from titles such as
House of Mystery. By the art alone I was able to follow most of the goings-on of the pirates, abusive husbands, werewolves, sexy women and ghosts that populated them. The Stella Holmes serial appears to be newish material (when these periodicals came out), anchoring the reprints, and was drawn by a different writer-artist team each issue, which resulted in an inconsistent character model: by and large, though, she is drawn with a flat-planed face, a style not unusual for Italian comics (as an aside, an Italian comics influence can be easily detected in Charles Burns' art).
Dario Argento Presents Deep Red also includes
fumetti in the English sense (
fumetti[3] is the word for comics in Italian, just as the word for comics in Japan is manga: however, when one uses the word in English, it means more specifically a comic that uses photos instead of drawings) and short articles on horror films interspersed throughout: for example, some of Argento's writing about Alfred Hitchcock (actually, perhaps the closest U.S. analogue to
Dario Argento Presents Deep Red is
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine). Though I can't say
Dario Argento Presents Deep Red is really worth seeking out (especially for a monolinguist such as myself), considering that
Creepy,
Eerie, EC and
House of Mystery reprints are so readily available (and, for that matter, there's
The Dylan Dog Case Files), it is an amusing oddity I would like to know more about.
Notes:
[1] If Wikipedia is accurate, this is a common format for Italian comics.
[2] She may indeed be the Stella Holmes, or homage to the character, from the 1980 Italian horror film .
[3] It means "puff of smoke," which is a reference to word balloons.
Image credits:
Art ©1991 Edizioni Eden Srl
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2010
