Are there very many eurocult movies that are adaptations of comic books or graphic novels? I can't think of very many off the top of my head other than Diabolik and Dellamorte Dellamore/Cemetary Man, and the latter doesn't really have anything to do with its nominal source, Tiziano Sclavi's Dylan Dog, other than Dylan Dog's appearance being modeled on Rupert Everett. I have the first two issues of Dylan Dog that Dark Horse published in 1999; at first I was disappointed to discover that it actually has almost nothing to do with Michele Soavi's film, but it's still a pretty good horror comic in its own right (Instead of Noggi [sp?], Dylan Dog's sidekick is a thinly-disguised version of Groucho Marx!).

Other than Dylan Dog, I have very little knowledge of Italian comics, but I would bet that there's probably some cool euro-cult horror comics that have never made it across the Atlantic (I can understand a little bit of Italian by way of my limited knowledge of Spanish, but I doubt I would have much luck trying to read untranslated Italian comics). Are there any movies based on them?

Wasn't BARBARELLA a comic book originally? I seem to remember a chapter in the book 'Immoral Tales' on comic book adaptations... <goes away to check...>

Indeed - the following are listed as being films based on comic book characters (but I guess not necessarily based on a specific comic book):

BARBARELLA
SATANIK
DIABOLIK
KRIMINAL
ISABELLE
GWENDOLINE

Apparently, the character Valentina in BABA YAGA is from a comic book too.

I was actually thinking more in terms of comic book-based movies with storylines that have clear antecedents from comic books or graphic novels, not just movies that use characters from comic books. Of course, unless I'm mistaken, there may not even be very many comic book/graphic novel adaptations from anywhere (excluding Japan) that fit that criterion beyond fairly recent ones like Sin City, 300, Hellboy, and A History of Violence. I could very well be wrong about that though.

The closest to what you want (that I can think of) is BABA YAGA, which copies parts of Guido Crepax's related VALENTINA multipart adventure pretty literally.

I believe that Crepax either storyboarded a few very distinctively Crepaxian sections himself (as he'd done for Tinto Brass original comic-like creation CUORE IN GOLA, which I haven't yet seen) or someone 'traced' him, as it were: there are short sequences that evoke the elegantly cluttered mise en scene and even the layout of the page (as best as a linear movie can do without benefit of split screen: the effect of complexly interconnected panels is handled through jazzy montage)...or so I seem to recall.

Do a google image search for Baba Yaga and Crepax and you'll find some of the pages from the original story, wonderful art but probably a bit too spicy to post here. PS I just found an interview with the director of BABA YAGA in which he was asked point blank whether his friend Crepax storyboarded the sequences I mentioned... to which he replied, no, they were his own best imitation of the way the comics looked and played on the page.

DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE was actually based on a novel by Sclavi. It was never intended to tie in with Dylan Dog.

This is one of my favorite sub-sub-genres, actually. I just watched FLASHMAN recently, for the umpteenth time, and it's one of my favorites. I've also watched MISTER X (aka AVENGER X) and FENOMENAL AND THE TREASURE OF TUTANKHAMEN more than once, even though I wouldn't call either a "good" movie by any means. Andre Hunebelle's FANTOMAS trilogy deserves to be in this category as well. The first one is the best, but all three are worth viewing. I enjoy SATANIK quite a bit as well. I have a number of issues of the Italian fumetti and even though I don't read Italian, I can tell that the movie didn't really capture the essence of the comic. Still, I really enjoy the film. It's a bit slow moving, but very sexy in parts.

I've only seen the first KRIMINAL film sans subtitles, but I know there are subtitled DVDs out there somewhere. With FLASHMAN, I actually wedded the English soundtrack from a Greek pre-record to the visuals from an Italian DVD. I was also able to find and/or create subtitle scripts for the Fantomas films.

Franco's LUCKY THE INSCRUTABLE is fun, as are the THREE SUPERMEN movies (although I don't like them as much as others seem to.) And finally, if you haven't seen the Turkish KILINK films, you ain't seen nothin' yet!

There were rumors of a DYLAN DOG animated film some time ago. Did that ever see the light of day?

D.

According to Wikipedia, the source novel "was inspired by the third special issue of Dylan Dog, Orrore nero (Black Horror), released July 1989, in which Dylan met Dellamorte, a sort of Italian alter ego."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_dog#Dellamorte_Dellamore

Is this accurate?

Also, I thought that this quote was interesting:

Italian author Umberto Eco said: "I can read the Bible, Homer, or Dylan Dog for several days without being bored."

When I was in Italy, I glanced through a large, hardcover DYLAN DOG album that clearly had scenes in it that were almost identical to things in DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE, but I've since heard that that particular story was published *after* the movie. I've always understood the original DELLAMORTE novel had nothing to do with Dylan Dog at all, but that the confusion came from the fact that Rupert Everett was cast in the movie and Sclavi based his drawings of Dylan Dog on him.

I wish there were more Dylan Dog translations available. Five of them came out several years ago and I loved them, although they were in black in white. I have a softcover collection from Italy in full color and it makes a big difference.

D.

Here's an image of Francesco Dellamorte in the 1989 Dylan Dog adventure that -apparently- inspired novel and film alike:



My source

I only started reading the adventures a couple years later, in a rather casual though enthusiastic way, and missed this one entirely.

Is it just me, or does Dellamorte resemble George Lazenby in that panel? :blink:

Milo Manara's cult erotic comic LE CLIC became a feature in the late 90's.
It's a wonder it took so long for filmmakers to catch on about Graphic Novels considering filmakers as varied as Fellini, Satyijit Ray & Gilliam started out as cartoonists. Every comics creator I know secretly dreams that Hollywood'll come knocking, myself included.

And don't forget Kon Ichikawa, cartoonist -as in animation director- and puppeteer (much like Bob Clampett), who has continued to do those things amidst the live-action films, themselves profoundly influenced by graphic narrative techniques of economical and expressive story telling. I'll die happy and at peace if I ever recover that best of Ichikawa souvenirs: his photo-graphic novelization of his Topo Gigio and the Nuclear Monsters animatronic puppetoon adventure in the form of a kids' book, a fantastic hybrid of movie and book, and of familiar light hearted Italian Mouse caught up in a creepy, expressionist Japanese post-Bomb nightmare told with excellent Bava Cel lighting of mean urban nocturnal streets and, and every sort of noir and science fiction movie staple employed and freshly imagined in stunning cartoon-y fashion: the robots and droids here are wonders of Univac and Sperry Rand computer mechanical flotsam and ticker tape.

I can only imagine how great the movie may be, buut I have read the comic book!

Part of the slowness of translating comic to screen may be due the formal difficulties of making one thing work in another medium...especially when such 'graphic novels'/bandes dessinees as might be adapted were recognized as 'cinematic' to begin with. It might seem a no-brainer, a natural match, and yet, similar effects in comic and movie are achieved through means proper to their respective mediums alone for the most part. Finding cinematic equivalents of things like graphic narrative layout (as in adapting Valentina for Baba Yaga; see comment above) was an initial exploratory process that lasted several years and several adaptations...or movies, like Tinto Brass's Cuore in Gola, purely cinematic in origin but one hundred percent 'in the style of' the graphic equivalent (again, see comment on Crepax in earlier post). Between these kinds of effort, movies discovered how to be comic books and graphic novels, how to blow up the images and color while stripping down the dialogue and foregrounding the situations and their mise en scene of blank spaces and dense thickets of internal bric a brac or external landscape with bold figures against them. (Extended study of Japanese film, so much more inclined in this direction already, was also absolutely essential, though a quick tour of Michelangelo Antonioni or Alfred Hitchcock, Sergei Eisensenstein as a chaser, could also teach you some storyboarding tricks right quick.) This represented a great technological leap forward for comic book franchise rights holders, but something of an artistic limitation for auteurs like Fellini, who'd have been happier conjuring up a Mandrake the Magician purely out of his own refracting graphic narrative imagination than live up to the latest code of cartoon-moviemaking that producer Dino was trying to impose. In a sense, why simply reproduce what's already worked perfectly on its own graphic terms? What can one possibly add? Those questions have probably given many a director pause over the decades.

Why *didn't* Brass hook up with a Crepax or, especially, a Manara?

Even better than BABA YAGA is the demented and very fun film/TV series version of Crepax's comic (the film version was taken from several episodes edited together, which really just makes it all the more outrageous and delightful), VALENTINA. I understand it's difficult to clear because of music rights (it does seem to feature a lot of pop music hits); but seriously... somebody has to put this 80's classic out on DVD; at least the film if not the entire series. Aren't there any countries that don't have to honor the music copyright laws? :lol: