Review
5 min read
Reviewed by Beatrice
· 26. June 2023
Clerville, late 1960s
Some follow a religion
Some chase their first million
Some chase their great love
And some chase their own end
The truth
The truth can be changed
The truth
The truth can be disguised
You hunt me
In my eyes, what you fixate on
Is the depth of the abyss
Some chase their chance
Some try to be better
Some chase their great love
And some chase their obsession
The truth
The truth I can organize
The truth
If necessary, it can be disguised
I only trust
When I see what you fixate on
The depth of the abyss
The depth of the abyss
A few difficult days
A few dangerous days
Don't be afraid, you know why
The truth
The truth can be changed
The truth
The truth can be disguised
You hunt me
In my eyes, follow my steps
I wouldn’t want you to find there
The depth of the abyss
The depth of the abyss
(Manuel Agnelli, La profondità degli abissi)
Walter Dorian is married to Elisabeth, a woman who lives alone in a majestic villa. Her husband is almost never there, making brief appearances; his work occupies all his time.
Walter Dorian is the first false identity of Diabolik, a criminal,
a killer with a chilling gaze who occupies the daily life of the police and Inspector Ginko, a sharp commissioner with a murky past.
Issue number 3: Bellair (mountain location of Clerville)
Eva Kant is a woman who is not at the service of any man.
With a family and a past deserving of its own chapter, she is one of the most beautiful women on the planet, to whom her mother, before committing suicide, advised never to trust men.
Her elegance drives Deputy Minister of Justice Giorgio Caron crazy; he has made deals with the South African underworld from which Eva hails and knows all about her past.
The pink diamond will lead her to meet Diabolik, already a dream in the drawer of the enlightened creature whose surname derives, not coincidentally, from the philosopher of Königsberg.
Eva will save her beloved's life twice, first from the guillotine and then from his archenemy: Ginko.
Both diabolical, they will become the most faithful and envied couple in the comic, always aided by technology, gases, substances, drugs, and surprising false identities.
If meeting Diabolik is like meeting death, according to Ginko,
Eva will gain a new life, reciprocated by the undeniable love of the genius of crime.
No one can afford to touch her: her snake-shaped jewelry gives her a biblical reference, her name no longer associated with the disappointing first man, replaced by the refined, highly cultured, albeit criminal, ideal man.
The ingenious Giussani sisters, devoutly honored by the Manetti brothers, shape a new man, a diabolical superman who can project women's desires into an otherwise unrealizable elsewhere (Clerville).
One will be the mirror of the other, in cunning, readiness, creativity, and audacity. The goals will never be wealth as
the film’s ending decrees: both are proletarians in the ruthless game of life and death, crowned by an exclusive and
self-sufficient love.
"Either I follow my heart and trust, or I follow reason and kill you," Diabolik tells Eva shortly after meeting her.
And if Ginko and Diabolik have the same hairline, the suspicion is that they are interchangeable, or that they enjoy alternating in their
respective roles: this is the charm of the comic!
Between scopolamine and super fake kisses, the Manetti brothers’ film rigorously and faithfully tells the story of Diabolik and Eva Kant, of a “negative” hero and heroine, a break from traditional comics, accused at the time of being uneducational and
anti-pedagogical.
If the king of terror and evil triumph, the success of the comic is due to the pragmatism of the couple, who must always overcome challenges and achieve their goals.
Although this message, of the end justifying any means, may seem tendentially psychopathological, Diabolik’s Jaguar X-Type precisely conveys the rhythm of the futuristic narrative.
The new Adam for Eva can only be Diabolik, and their crazy adventure, accompanied by the social power of comic communication for campaigns like divorce, euthanasia, the Basaglia law, feminism, remains etched in the encyclopedia of fantasy.
With this film, the Manetti brothers faithfully celebrate the characters
creating a 133-minute prestige work: the eyes and charm of Luca Marinelli, the elegance and beauty of Miriam Leone, and the irony of Valerio Mastandrea, masterful in their respective interpretations,
immerse the viewer in the noir and magical reality of Clerville, where fantasy is constructed with materials provided by the harshest reality.
This comic was born as a crazy splinter in our publishing world, with no educational or pedagogical intent.
Diabolik is always on the run, dark, silent, sociopathic: his crazy adventure finds its alter ego in an emancipated and free woman, Eva, for whom the only possible Adam is Diabolik, who recognizes and establishes his trust, becoming with her a true couple sharing the same relationship with reality.
Everything belongs to everyone, theft becomes only a provocation to claim
this: Eva and Diabolik are not two accumulators enslaved to the “discourse of capitalism.”
Diabolik is a proletarian of theft; Diabolik is applied mathematics and physics.
The system has generated a disease, the Giussani sisters claim,
and this disease is Diabolik; he is outside the system but without the system, he wouldn’t know what to fight.
“Don't be deluded, the character still works, Diabolik will have a reason to exist until the day this society no longer needs people like him to reveal its contradictions... Let the righteous not be deluded because there is a potential Diabolik in everyone who bows their head before the master.”
Words of Angela Giussani
