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Rating: The release of an issue with two zeros is always a special event for fans of the nightmare investigator, but the importance of this latest issue is multiplied by the fact that it is the culmination of a radical renewal process that has forever changed Tiziano Sclavi's comic.
Scripted by Roberto Recchioni and drawn by Angelo Stano and Corrado Roi, "And Now, the Apocalypse" represents the destruction of a world, the one created thirty years ago by Sclavi, but also the attempt to create a new one.
In the introduction to issue 400, Recchioni explains the reasons for this choice, stating that his narrative is indeed a "celebration" of Tiziano Sclavi, but also "a sort of farewell to his extraordinary legacy, so gigantic and unattainable that it has become a kind of burden for all the authors who have tackled the character."
It is undeniable, in fact, that by distancing himself from his creation, Sclavi left a void that no one had until now been able or willing to fill. The authors who inherited it, for a long time, continued pretending nothing had changed; endlessly reproducing the narrative scheme Sclavi developed, but without that depth of thought and visionary imagination that made each of his nightmares so absurd and at the same time so real.
Recchioni is right when he says that Dylan Dog should not be "a sacred icon to be kept in a showcase gathering dust."
"In Tiziano's hands," Recchioni continues, "our Old Boy was a living, changeable character in constant flux," "a rolling stone on which moss couldn't grow"; and that is why, from now on, "we screenwriters who came after Tiz take on the commitment to keep that stone rolling. Maybe, sometimes, we'll go off course or get stuck in some hole, but we promise not to stop and to continue trying."
One could argue with Recchioni that one thing is to "go off course," and quite another is to throw "the stone" into space, turning it into a meteorite; one thing is to get stuck in a hole, and another is to throw oneself with the stone around one's neck into an abyss from which it will be impossible to emerge. In short, one could have given the comic a different direction without completely and irreparably revolutionizing its identity.
On the other hand, it is also true that almost seven years have passed since Bonelli, in agreement with Tiziano Sclavi, officially passed the baton to Roberto Recchioni, and if he wanted, as he has repeatedly stated, to give the comic his own stylistic and narrative imprint, stepping out of that groove traced by Sclavi and followed pedantically for thirty years by other scriptwriters, he had every right, and perhaps even duty, to do so.
The underlying problem, however, is another: to keep a stone rolling, strength is needed, but to create a good story, creativity, originality, imagination, style, personality, and above all, talent are required; all things Recchioni has not yet demonstrated to have.
His stories are superficial, lacking depth, boring, but also unnecessarily laden with quotations and references. All the lines of his characters seem randomly taken from the mouths of other characters. Everything that happens in the story is a succession of references to other stories. Everything that appears on the pages has already been seen, read, and heard dozens of times. Everything that comes from his pen is a pale imitation of something that has already been said and written by others before and better than him.
"And Now, the Apocalypse!" is no exception and indeed brings to the extreme the author's tendency to shamelessly raid the most famous works of the '900, deluding himself that reassembling the pieces following a logical order is enough to create something that is more than a mere sum of imitations.
Enthralled by this conviction, Recchioni does not hesitate in the introduction to provide with self-satisfaction the list of copied works: 27 can be counted, but there are others, he says, that are not listed. So, in about ninety pages, there are thirty quotations, but some of these unfold over several pages.
Result: a mishmash of images and references that follow one another relentlessly, and often without logic, until the bizarre metafinal, where Recchioni frees himself from the "burden" represented by Sclavi's "legacy," destroying it along with its own creator (!!!).
"The apocalypse" is complete, "and now" it can be published in volume and distributed in bookstores throughout Italy, to publicly sanction and celebrate the new course started by Recchioni.
Not even a month passes, however, before the aforementioned narrative is joined in bookstores by another elegant volume. Its title is: "Dylan Dog presents: the tales of tomorrow. Volume 1: The Impossible Book." Author: Tiziano Sclavi.
Judging by the different reception given by fans to the aforementioned volumes, it seems that Sclavi's Dylan Dog is anything but dead... while Recchioni's is merely an abortion.
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