Barbara Baraldi says the job of curating Dylan Dog still makes her uneasy in the best way. Three years after being named to the post, the 51-year-old writer from Mirandola says the nerves and pulse still tremble, and that the fear is part of what keeps the comic alive.
The timing matters because Dylan Dog is being celebrated this year for its first 40 years with an exhibition in Pescara at Cartoons on the Bay, the festival dedicated to animation and transmedia languages organized by Rai Com. For readers searching cremona and the wider world of Italian comics, Baraldi’s remarks show how one of the country’s most recognizable series is being steered at a moment when it is still judged against the standard set by Tiziano Sclavi, who created Dylan Dog in 1986.
Baraldi says she came to the job as both a fan and a studiosa of Dylan, and she treats that background as part of her strength. She says she tries to remove limits for the writers who work with her, because when Dylan walks between nightmare and reality, everything can be dared. She also says the series is still “avanguardistico,” built to face topics that remain current rather than retreat from them.
That freedom, though, is not the same as carelessness. Baraldi says she wants no plot limits and no censorship, but insists everything has to pass through delicacy and metaphor. That filter has already shaped stories that touched war without naming war, and two issues that dealt with Alzheimer’s disease and the guilt felt by caregivers. For her, the point is not shock for its own sake. She says the voyeurism of horror is one of society’s evils, and that a comic like Dylan Dog can offer an antidote by telling reality through allegory.
That approach also reaches back to why she writes at all. Baraldi says she began writing so she could endure what she saw on television news, images that made her cry. She now asks her writers to put something of their own experience into the work, saying pain cannot be written honestly unless it has been lived. It is a blunt rule for a series built on nightmares, but it is also the reason the book can still speak to readers who do not want lectures or censorship, only stories that recognize what hurts. What comes next is still the open question: not whether Dylan Dog will keep crossing taboo subjects, but which one Baraldi will choose to push through the next metaphor.
