This page contains unmarked spoilers. You Have Been Warned!
Dylan Dog was the most popular comic book series in Italy during its heyday because when it wasn't horrifying, some of the most beloved storylines were emotional roller coasters.
Goodbye, Johnny...
- "Johnny Freak" (#81): Johnny is a deaf, abandoned boy without legs, found by Dylan. Johnny displays amazing intelligence (he learned how to read lips and to speak, albeit badly) artistic abilities, and forms a bond with Dylan, nurse Dora and Groucho. Then things go downhill as his origins are revealed: he's the illegitimate son of the Arkham family, born deaf but otherwise healthy, while his legitimate brother Dougal was born with a degenerative illness. The Arkhams then used Johnny's organs and limbs to replace his brother's when they started failing, while otherwise keeping Johnny trapped in the basement. For years. How does the story end? Dougal shoots Johnny because he loathes him as a "freak", then has a heart attack after Dylan beats him up in response. As Dylan is at Johnny's death bed Johnny's last request to him is to give his heart to Dougal in order to save him. Dylan almost refuses to do so, but can't bring himself to betray what is effectively his own son.
- The polarizing sequel storyline "Johnny's Heart" (#127) turns Johnny's touching request into a cruel Nice Job Breaking It, Hero because Dougal goes on to become that issue's Monster of the Week. While killing his own parents isn't too unwarranted, what makes it tragic is that Dora gets murdered too, making Johnny indirectly responsible for her death due to him allowing Dougal's survival.
- "Memories from the Invisible World" (#19): By many, this story is considered the best of the series for being subversive and poetic, but also exceptionally gut-wrenching and tragic. The narrator is a man who has become invisible because nobody in his life ever acknowledged his existence, until he finally gained an appearance when he found love with a prostitute named Aileen. She gets murdered by a mysterious and unrecognizable serial killer (who is labeled as an "Invisible Man"), which causes him to return invisible. Aileen's friend Bree Daniels hires Dylan to help the case of the Invisible Man, who's targeting prostitutes. The investigations keep failing until the murderer, Hiram Bailey, turns himself in explaining that he murdered 29 women for no real reason, and gets sentenced and hanged on Christmas Day. That same day, the invisible narrator, being left with no more purpose or reason to live, shoots himself in the head hoping to be reunited with Aileen. Dylan meanwhile falls strongly in love with Bree, to the point of being even willing to marry her, but much to his dismay Bree averts the Pretty Woman scenario from happening and ends their relationship, not even after Dylan saves her from a client who tried to kill her. A new Invisible Man, Mr. Coldwater, shows up and attempts to murder Bree, but instead stabs the invisible narrator in the chest, who reveals to have survived the gunshot to the head, and succumbs to the knife, but not before killing Coldwater. The issue ends with a shaken Bree calling Dylan, who is still depressed for their relationship not working out. Does she finally accept him after the experience? No. The story just ends right after Dylan answers the call.
- "The Long Goodbye" (#74): Marina Kimball, an old flame of Dylan when he went to her town Moonlight for a summer vacation, presents herself at Dylan's doorstep with no memory of how she got there and asks Dylan to take her home. This issue avoids monsters or horror elements and is instead a successfully sentimental story between Dylan and Marina as they travel and talk about the old days and how their lives have turned out. Dylan acridly remembers having left Moonlight after almost killing himself because of Marina preferring a rough guy named Robby (with whom she had a bad marriage that ended with his death) over him despite declaring his love for her. In the end Dylan arrives in Moonlight and, as he suspected, Marina killed herself and before dying made a last wish to see him again. As he returns home, Dylan finally remembers that despite leaving Moonlight angrily back then, Marina did run after him and had a proper Train-Station Goodbye, which remains tragic for Dylan not hearing Marina yelling that she loves him too, screaming back at her "You'll tell me next summer!", and present day Dylan bitterly wonders "But how much time separates us from the next summer?"
- "Beyond Death" (#88): Bree Daniels, Dylan's Hooker with a Heart of Gold love interest from "Memories from the Invisible World" is dying of AIDS. The Grim Reaper arrives and Dylan begs to not take her away. Death makes a deal: Dylan will have to kill someone, and that someone's life will be traded for Bree's survival. Dylan decides to expose himself to lure and fight to death Johnny Dark, a cybernetic serial killer who is now the new "Invisible Man" behind the murders of the story. But despite Dylan killing him after a brutal fight, Bree ends up dying anyway. Death reveals that in the fight, Dylan died from the severe injuries Dark subjected him to, and Death had to use Dark's life to save Dylan's because his time to die hasn't come yet.
- Johnny Dark is a Complete Monster serial killer who once fought Dylan in an industrial plant where he lost an arm, hand and legs and got disfigured and flushed away after falling into an Acid Pool. He was found and fished out of the Thames my Tabitha Madame (the drawfism-affected mother of Mr. Coldwater and the invisible narrator from "Memories"), still mourning the loss of their sons and thus easily manipulated by a barely alive Dark when he addressed to her as "mommy", she took pity on him and decided to spend all her savings to have him healed and fixed up with state of the art prosthetics. Out of motherly love she defends him when Dylan visits her to know where Dark is, as the killer managed to further manipulate her into believing he had nothing to do with the killings and has changed. Once Dylan leaves, Dark comes out and Tabitha embraces him when he reassures her that he's innocent, before swiftly stabbing the poor old lady to death.
- It appears that Dylan considers Bree's death one of his greatest failures as in "Deep Space" (#337) a story set in the far future where teams of synthetic Dylan Dog clones are employed to solve paranormal cases on spaceships, follows a Dylan clone named "Number 5" (the most 'faithful' clone in the group, whereas the other Dylans he works with are genetically altered to exceed at specific roles) who is sent on a mission to retrieve a cargo ship infested by Event Horizon-style cosmic ghosts. Said demons can enter your mind and use Your Worst Memory against you, and one of them takes the appearance of Bree to torment Number 5.
- "Story of Nobody" (#43): In the midst of this intense Mind Screw story, the title character Nobody ("Nessuno") is a huge woobie, a deeply unhappy and unlucky average Joe stuck in a state between life and death, who dreams about escaping into another life, and apparently creates alternate realities. In the current "canon" universe, Nobody dies of a heart attack secretly caused by his cheating wife, and in that moment creates an alternate universe in which Xabarax is his psychiatrist, isn't related to Dylan and is in good terms with him. In this alternate universe, Nobody dreams of things to come in the canon universe, and Alternate!Xabarax theorizes with Alternate!Dylan that Nobody is a creator of universes and must be stopped even at the risk of erasing their own reality because Nobody could unleash horrors upon the world without realizing. After Alternate!Xabarax is killed by zombies generated by Nobody, Alternate!Dylan shoots Nobody dead, erasing the alternate reality as Nobody returns in the canon universe as a freshly resurrected zombie Xabarax wants to use. Nobody is later shot dead again by Dylan (by accident, since he was aiming for an escaping Xabarax), but the astral projection of Nobody reassures Dylan that he put him out of his misery and can finally fade away into nothing once and for all after the horrors of his alternate lives ("I hope this is really the end now, who would've thought that dying is as difficult as living?"). It's hard to not feel sorry for poor Nobody and the existential nightmare he's unwillingly part of. The only post-mortem justice he gets is in the comic's ending, where a zombie homeless man (accidentally turned by Nobody before the climax), tracks down and kills Nobody's wife and the man he was cheating him with.
- "Witch Hunt" (#69): God, is it heart-wrenching to see all the crap Justin Moss (the author of a horror comic that is being targeted by cesorship fanatics) unfairly goes through. As Dylan notes, people were more quick to blame the violence depicted in his comic that was read by a young man who murdered his grandmother instead of his alcoholic father, or his prostitute mother, or the reformatory where he spent three years or just the system in general that doesn't help poor people in need and instead injects selfish, greedy priorities into young people's heads through other means. It's more infuriating when Inspector Bloch rejects an investigation because even he says that youth delinquency has always been on the rise and that "You should instead question their parents, their teachers, the government, question anyone, but you can't question Freddy Krueger!" only for his words to be twisted by the same newspaper outlets that condemn Justin's work. Anyone who's against overzealous censorship and Moral Guardians scapegoating fiction can relate to this story.
- "Goblin" (#45): The Reveal that the Goblin is an unusually intelligent monkey that escaped from a vivisection laboratory and remembers every person who took part in the butchering of their mate and killed them, with the exception of the head scientist Dr. Hornell, who is rescued by Dylan. Hornell explains the origins of the monkey and we see through a flashback sequence how he separated the two monkeys and brutally vivisected one, while the 'Goblin' could only watch in anguish. This story will certainly upset any animal rights person, Dylan being one himself delivers Hornell a brutal "The Reason You Suck" Speech against vivisection and animals being mistreated in the name of science, to the point even the Girl of the Week, despite being the daughter of one of the victims, agrees with him that what her father and Hornell's team did was barbaric. Hornell being a callous jerkass dismisses them both and leaves, but thankfully the monkey reveals to have survived Dylan's hit and proceeds to complete its revenge.
- The monkey returns and dies in the special colored story "Beware the Goblin" while helping Dylan bust an illegal dogfighting ring.
- "Alpha and Omega" (#9) has a more Heartwarming type of tear jerker when Alpha, a poor space chimp that has become a higher being after returning from deep space, explains to Dylan that he decided to return to Earth because despite all the Humans Are Bastards feelings he has towards the men that did this to him, he doesn't want to be a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds opting instead to gift humanity with a "crumb of infinity", adding: "Does it surprise you? Is it perhaps easier for you to expect my wrath, my vengeance... But could you imagine my kindness?" and before dying, Alpha quotes the iconic Roy Batty speech from Blade Runner.
- "Hells" (#46): The story opens in a rather sorrowful manner when we follow an old man named Steven, who bought a special ring at an auction for six hundred and sixty-six pounds as a birthday gift for his wife Kate who loved that ring upon seeing it decades earlier... but we soon find out Kate is DEAD and Steven keeps her corpse sitting on the living room's armchair out of love and he puts the ring in her hand before breaking down in tears and deciding to read her Henry James' The Altar of the Dead. After Steven finishes reading, Kate's corpse suddenly speaks and says that his love for her hasn't died, but instead allowed him to break through every barrier between one life and the other, telling him that finally his time has come to reunite by breaking the final barrier. Steven kills himself by drinking a glass of water where Kate poured a powdered poison hidden within in the ring and moves on to the afterlife with her.
- "The Land of Colored Shadows" (#107) has met a rather contested reception for being Lighter and Softer than its classic predecessor "Pink Rabbits Kill" (#24), but it has a few touching moments in this tonal shift, such as Pink Rabbit's Pet the Dog moment when helping a terminally ill kid in a hospital who's a huge fan of his cartoons to pass away in peace by reassuring him that they'll meet again in the toon world, Groucho's genuine sadness when Dylan is fatally wounded and comatose after Pink Rabbit threw a fridge on him, and the Bittersweet Ending: Peter Pencil awakens from his coma despite previously stating that he wanted to stay in the toon world, explaining he changed his mind after his girlfriend Betty Bloom (who had died and became a toon) suddenly began to insult him into leaving. Dylan understands that Betty pulled a Break His Heart to Save Him sacrificing her own happiness so that Peter could move on and enjoy his life to the fullest. Peter even goes as far as deciding to give up his cartoonist and animator career and immediately starts hooking up with a nurse, while Dylan notices Betty crying on TV and tells Bloch "I'll tell you a true story, Bloch... rather absurd and a bit sad." as they leave.
- "Towards a Far Away World" (#140): While the comic generally depicts Domestic Abuse towards both sexes with the abusive husband/wife being an asshole victim that bites the dust in gruesome ways, this storyline highlights the horrors of violence towards women, as we follow Primrose (an alien entity looking for her companion in the shape of another man, Vaal) married to the highly abusive Bud, who's prone to mercilessly beat her into a pulp over the tiniest mistake she makes. Dylan finally shooting the son of a bitch dead in the climax is considered by many one of the most cathartic moments of the series.
- "Bad Thoughts" (#138): Despite being very derivative of The Green Mile, this storyline succeeds in being an engaging discourse on the topics of racism and well-flashed out characters such as the wrongly accused Forrest and his young lawyer Lee Riker, who bravely stands up against the accusations towards him. And it ultimately makes the ending in which Forrest is discharged (the real killer was a man wearing Black Face) but is killed by a racist prison guard a bitter All for Nothing. The presentation of the final punch to the gut is so mercilessly to the point without any fanfare: Lee happily comes down the stairs with the permit to take Forrest out of prison, Dylan interrupts her by giving the bad news, and in the final panel he's embracing a grieving Lee.
- Virgil, inspector Bloch's son from Issue #200 (an Origins Episode among several). He lost his mother at a young age, he felt like he wasn't as artistic as she was or strong like his father and be good enough to become a cop, and upon Bloch becoming more shut-in from the grief of the loss and constantly talking about Dylan, he became an addicted Green-Eyed Monster. Bloch quits his job to help Virgil go through his withdrawal, but Virgil escapes and armed with a gun (which turns out to be empty) he creates a Sadistic Choice situation holding Dylan at gunpoint and forcing Bloch to decide whether he cares more about him or his own son. In a moment of self-doubt, Dylan wonders if he ever loved his own father as much as Virgil does and if he really cares for his own life and actually encourages Bloch to shoot him instead, but Virgil gets gunned down by an officer. In light of this tragedy, Dylan promises to stand by Bloch's side and swears to be a non-drinker.
- "Beyond That Door" (#228): The issue opens in the first person view of a dying character on an operating table, and the whole story is narrated by them. Dylan arrives at the hospital deeply preoccupied for the narrating character being operated on, but then Groucho appears to join Dylan in the waiting room, then Inspector Bloch and then the Girl of the Week, thus the identity of the character we're experiencing the story through is completely unknown, all we know is that they have a deep connection with Dylan and the other main characters, and we see various flashbacks depicting the unknown narrator helping Dylan & Co. in various dire situations, and even confronting Xabaras, telling him that they're done being the link between him and Dylan. Xabaras is secretly asked by the doctor operating the narrator to give him the re-animating serum to save them, but Xabaras decides not to because he fears that they'll go tell Dylan about him and force them to confront each other. In the end, despite the surgeon's efforts, the unknown narrator dies to the dismay of Dylan and the others. Many have interpreted the issue to be a metaphor of the writers influencing the comic's characters and then having to pass the torch to another author who will continue to influence their actions, but regardless of the various readings one could apply to this storyline, it remains an emotionally gripping read. "My... it's not bad, seen from here. I'm always amazed at how much blood the human body can contain. And how much empathy an unknown death can provoke."
- "Marty" (#244): Through Botolo, Dylan meets and befriends Marty Kevorkian, an elderly, out of shape, unattractive man who has never had any luck in love or careers in his lonely and unhappy life due to his lack of courage to stand up for himself. In order to cope with this, Marty has created an imaginary Jude Law-looking persona he named Julian Kidd, who's instead a rich, dashing serial killer that targets and brutally executes the people who wronged Marty. Despite the satisfaction he gains from it, Marty feels terrible for imagining those things and wonders if it makes him a bad person, which in turn gives Dylan (and the reader) food for thought about human nature and if the desire for bloody revenge when we're really upset says something about us. In the end, Marty is diagnosed with a pancreatic cancer and Dylan, being the only person close to him, is given the task of putting Marty out of his misery with morphine injections. In the panel where Dylan covers Marty's body, sunshine beams through the window in a Call-Back to Johnny Freak's death.
