Italy’s most famous comic-book creation, Diabolik, wears a signature jet-black bodysuit on his combat missions and kills without compunction. An amalgam of James Bond and the cat burglar Raffles (with shades of Cadbury’s Milk Tray Man), Diabolik speaks several languages and, with his physique rippling under spandex, is a seductive, if sinister, criminal mastermind. For much of the time, he drives a Jaguar E-Type with an array of 007-style gadgetry on board. His partner in crime, Eva Kant, is a blonde Barbarella-style martial arts expert who goes into action armed with a small but lethal cyanide dart gun and a variety of gas bombs, knockout sprays and truth serums. Together, she and Diabolik battle a range of unsavoury types, from gangland hoodlums to pimps and wife-beaters. They never rob from the poor or hurt children or animals.
Launched in northern Italy in the early 1960s as a pocketbook-sized graphic novel, Diabolik has sold more than 150 million copies worldwide and acquired a near-mythic status in contemporary Italian culture. Umberto Eco was an admirer, as was the novelist Dino Buzzati, who had a dog called Diabolik. The monthly comic was the brainchild of Angela and Luciana Giussani, two sisters from Milan’s upper middle class who spotted a gap in the cartoon market for a new-look amoral antihero. With his brooding good looks, Diabolik faintly resembled the Hollywood idol Robert Taylor; his thieving skills were indebted to those of Fantômas in the Parisian crime series created in 1911 by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, which the Giussanis greatly admired.
The comic’s first issue, Il re del terrore (The King of Terror), appeared on newsstands in November 1962, and cost 150 lire. On the cover was a picture of Diabolik in his fireproof body-hugging sweatsuit; only his thick eyebrows and ice-blue eyes are visible beneath it. Printed by the Astorina publishing house, which Angela Giussani ran from Milan, the comic was Italy’s answer to the American Marvel franchise. It gave birth to the fumetto nero (dark comic) sub-genre, in which the noirish suspense typically involved backstreet killings, kidnappings and sleazy business deals. Unquestionably, Diabolik mirrored a mood of disenchantment in Italy. Beneath the roseate flush of the “economic miracle” that brought television sets and washing machines into every Italian home was a deepening social unease. In industrial Turin in 1958, a serial killer sent letters to the police signed “Diabolich” in his victims’ blood. The Giussani sisters substituted a “k” for the “ch” and their crime legend was born.
Factory hands, office clerks and train and bus commuters in Italy all eagerly devoured Diabolik, which had the tagline “Il fumetto del brivido” (“The thrill comic”). Conveniently, it could fit into a back pocket or handbag. Eva Kant, who made her debut in volume three of the series, L’arresto di Diabolik (The Arrest of Diabolik), became a pop art icon in Italy – stylish, self-possessed and a crack shot. She wears her hair in a severe bun and is thought to be Germanic in appearance; her surname may or may not allude to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. She is suspected of having murdered her abusive husband by setting a giant wild cat on him. Diabolik’s real name remains unknown to Eva, and probably he does not know it himself. (In the early episodes, he goes under the Wildean alias of Walter Dorian). Diabolik is jealous of any man who catches Eva’s eye; she becomes a head-turning presence in his life as they fall madly in love. She has emerald-green eyes and was believed to be modelled on Grace Kelly.
Angela and her younger sister, Luciana, wrote all the Diabolik episodes themselves, signing them “A. and L. Giussani” out of a concern that the Italian public would not buy crime comics devised by women. The stylish illustrations, with their pop speech bubbles and onomatopoeia (“Sciaff!”, “Wroom!”, “Ta-tlack!”) were the work of the Milanese graphic artist Enzo Facciolo. Very soon, the comic was selling more than 300,000 copies a month. Diabolik acquired new enemies over time, chief among them the incorruptible police chief Inspector Ginko, who is thwarted at every turn in his crime-fighting. This is hardly surprising. Diabolik has a wardrobe of lifelike, super-thin latex masks with which he and Eva acquire instant new identities and fool their adversaries. They rarely use firearms (too noisy) and prefer to kill by stealth with daggers strapped to their thighs. Eva keeps in touch with Diabolik via a radio built into her wristwatch. She constantly bails him out of jail, and worse. The Citroën DS that Ginko drives is no match for Diabolik’s souped-up E-Type.
Most of the stories are set in Clerville, an imaginary European city similar to Paris in its architecture, with an underground network of tunnels and oubliettes where Diabolik can lie low when he needs to. In one of the rare episodes set in Italy, Uno Stradivari per Eva Kant (A Stradivarius for Eva Kant), published in 2012, Diabolik steals a cache of diamonds concealed in a violin case in Cremona. The comic strip found a wider readership in 1968, when the Italian horror-film director Mario Bava adapted three Diabolik adventures for Danger:Diabolik (1968). The movie, starring Terry-Thomas as Clerville’s accident-prone finance minister, exaggerated the imagery and stylization of the originals for comic effect. Ennio Morricone’s saucy pop song “Deep Down” booms over scenes of dope-smoking and go-go dancing. Ginko the aspirant supercop is reliably and repeatedly foiled by Diabolik (“We’ve been had! Again!”), but the Giussani siblings were reportedly displeased by Bava’s psychedelic elaborations and the Morricone soundtrack, with its sitar noodling and organ freak outs.
As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, a number of parody Diabolik titles began to appear in Italy, among them Diabetik and Cattivik (cattivo means “bad” in Italian). Angela Giussani, self-styled “La Signora Diabolik”, used the comic to launch campaigns to legalize divorce and close down Italy’s decrepit mental asylums. She died in 1987. Her sister Luciana continued to run Astorina until 1998, when she handed over the directorship to Mario Gomboli, who by that point had worked on Diabolik for some thirty years. Under Gomboli, Diabolik has generated a wealth of merchandise available online – everything from chocolate Diabolik Easter eggs and Eva Kant jigsaw puzzles to Ginko duvet covers and a Diabolik aftershave (or is it a nerve agent?). In 1998, the Beastie Boys used footage from Danger: Diabolik for the video to their single “Body Movin’”. The comic has been translated into Tamil, Croatian and Serbian (though never, oddly, into English). It has contrived to keep up with the times. Clerville was seen to adopt the euro in 2002, with Eva having characteristically stolen a Euroconverter to help her adapt to the new currency. Diabolik still prefers to use a walkie-talkie instead of a mobile phone.
In Italy, the comic has never been more popular. The Manetti brothers’ noir-horror movie Diabolik: Who are you? is available on Apple TV+ in the USand Canada. Based on the cult issueDiabolik, chi sei? (1968), it tells of Diabolik’s early years on a secret island, where a band of outlaws under a mysterious crime lord called King train him in the arts of assassination, deception – and latex mask manufacture. To the islanders, he remains “The Boy” until a moribund King addresses him as “Diabolik”, after his one-time pet panther. The name sticks. In Clerville, meanwhile, armed bank robbers have made off with gold bullion and shot dead a bystander. Diabolik (played by the handsomely dark-browed Giacomo Gianniotti) resolves to investigate, only to end up chained to a cellar wall alongside his arch enemy, Inspector Ginko (Valerio Mastandrea). Surely Eva (Miriam Leone) will come to their rescue?
The film updates the original storyline to the 1970s, when Italy was convulsed by bomb attacks and political assassinations. The bank robbers, with their flared trousers and Che Guevara hair, are intended to suggest members of the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades), the most feared of the subversives who inflicted class warfare on Italy during the anni di piombo (“years of lead”). The smoulderingly glamorous Monica Bellucci plays Ginko’s lover, the titled heiress Altea of Vallenberg. Much of the soundtrack is provided by the retro Italian funk band Calibro 35, who borrow heavily from Morricone. Shot in various locations in northern Italy, Diabolik: Who are you? has a number of amusing set pieces after Quentin Tarantino, and the Diabolik of the film is very much in the spirit of Fantômas, being a casual, knife-killing criminal without much of a sense of humour.
Ian Thomson is the author of a biography of Primo Levi and is writing a book about Estonia during the Second World War
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