Rai journalist Vincenzo Mollica recently told me that this anti-hero is considered by many of his fans as a familiar face, almost as someone they would be happy to invite to their birthday parties and Christmas dinners.
At least one copy of this iconic comic book entered indeed every Italian house since it was first published and the comic book is still popular nowadays, so popular in fact that its publishing house, Astorina, releases two reprinted stories and one new story every month and also publishes two special issues every year.
An exhibition that is currently on at Rome’s Palazzo Incontro entitled “Diabolik – Eva Kant: Una vita vissuta diabolicamente” (Diabolik – Eva Kant: A Life Lived Diabolically), celebrates further the popularity of this iconic character.
A poster showing Diabolik and his partner Eva Kant running away with Castel Sant’Angelo in the background welcomes the fans at the door of Palazzo Incontro.
The palazzo, built on an area owned by the Ospedale di S. Maria della Pietà dei Poveri Pazzi in the second half of the 18th century under the supervision of G.P.Burij, is the typical example of a multi-family middle-class block of houses for rent, with a late Baroque façade. This sort of buildings spread in Rome from the mid-XVII century on and soon superseded the old single-family upper-class palace. 
The main door of the Palazzo opens onto the ground room, a medium-sized space.
Statues of Diabolik and Eva Kant guard this room in which a reproduction of Diabolik’s Jaguar installed in the main wall, gives the impression the criminal mastermind launched his car through the wall of the building.
This first room allows visitors to discover through 16 panels how a Diabolik story is created, starting with a diagram that analyses the modus operandi the anti-hero follows to succeed in his plans.
This story format, devised by Diabolik’s creators, the Giussani sisters, also inspired them a new type of screenplay that implies the use of only 2-3 cartoons per page.
The character faces, their clothes and the environment surrounding them are also instrumental to make the story more real, in the same way as the lettering and a precise use of the halftone screens became of fundamental importance. The last panels in this room reveal how important is it to create a striking cover that can attract the readers' attention. 
On the ground floor of the palazzo there is also a smaller theatre room in which visitors can stop to watch the documentary Le Sorelle Diabolike (The Diabolikal Sisters) directed by Andrea Bettinetti, that features clips of old interviews with the Giussani sisters and with their collaborators, friends and journalists (the part that shows an authors' meeting with the Giussani sisters trying to come up with fantastically amazing weapons for Diabolik is the best, since it shows how seriously the people who worked on the comic book treated the subject).
The first floor of the exhibition is divided in different rooms: the first room allows the visitors to discover the Eva Kant character (originally inspired by Grace Kelly), from the first issue in which she appeared, and highlights the importance she has in the story and how her relationship with Diabolik often became a problem for prissy moralists.
Diabolik and Eva are indeed not married, they have chosen not to have kids and their freedom and unconventional life scandalised many readers in the past, even though the comic was aimed at an adult audience.
Their relationship is not a murdering relationship like the one in Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione, but it’s more similar to Bonnie & Clyde’s.
Eva has also got a mysterious past and might be the killer of her previous husband, she is an independent and emancipated woman (driving a car was still unheard of for a woman when the comic first came out and Eva drove Mini Minors and Jaguars), so she was a sort of icon in her own way like the first woman in space.
As time passed Eva became an icon of elegance, class and femininity: Cosmopolitan published eight stories about her between 1975 and 1976; she became the testimonial for a lingerie line in 1998, turning into a ‘comic book top model’; when she turned 40 in 2003 many magazines dedicated her celebratory covers.
On the same floor visitors can discover the history of the publishing house, starting from the first comic books published by Astorina, such as the Albi Okey! and the inspirations that led to Diabolik.
Everything started indeed when Angela re-read a Fantomas story and made up her own controversial anti-hero that soon became a cult hit, spawning other characters such as Zakimat, a sort of female version of Diabolik, and attracting the attentions of the censors who banned a few issues (issue 82 was sized because it showed a girl in a bikini on the cover…).
Thanks to Mario Bava’s Danger Diabolik, the comic book became popular also abroad.
Success continued in the 70s, but, as society changed, the stories didn’t scandalise the readers anymore and the characters became more defined also on a psychological level.
In more recent years Radio Rai even developed a radio drama about Diabolik.
A section of the first floor is also dedicated to Angela and Luciana Giussani, extrovert and rebellious women, who left their careers (Angela first started working as model; Lucians was the quieter sister, maybe destined to become an ordinary employee) to create a small publishing empire. After they died their publishing house passed to their collaborator Mario Gomboli who directs it now.
One of the most exciting part on this floor is the section dedicated to the scale reproduction of traps, weapons and cars, very important elements in every Diabolik story.
Entitled “Between Science and Sci-Fi”, this part explores Diabolik’s laboratory, and includes reproductions by Franco Nodo of mechanical moles, devices that can melt steel walls, missiles, super equipped Jaguars and other assorted gadgets.
The third and last floor of the palazzo is a sort of collection of different posters from Bava’s film to comic fairs and exhibitions and other events advertised using Diabolik’s image.
The highlight on this floor are the ten pages taken from the first Diabolik issue published in 1962, with cartoons by a mysterious guy called Zarcone whose real identity was never clear.
The catalogue of the exhibition is published by Astorina and features all the images, text and cartoons included in the exhibition.
You can read my interview with Vincenzo Mollica on Dazed Digital to know more about the exhibition from the curator’s point of view. Please note that the exhibition is on until 13th September 2009. Here’s a 5-minute preview of a quick tour inside the Diabolik exhibition (you will have to install Veoh Video Compass to watch the full video in your browser or download it to your PC). Enjoy!
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