Comic Book / Cattivik

Cattivik is (was) an Italian comic book created by Bonvi, well known for Sturmtruppen, later made by Silver and other artists. It started as a parody of Diabolik, another Italian comic. The main Character is an ugly pear-shaped thing with a black suit that commits crimes (or at least tries to), usually by mugging people or burglary, but is always thwarted and suffers lots of Humiliation Conga of all sorts.

Its humour is often based on parody, fart and burp jokes and ludicrous violence, frequent parodies of Italian politicians, and politically incorrect jokes.

In 2008 an animated series was made, based on some episodes of the comic.

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Cattivik provides examples of:

• Abhorrent Admirer: "I Fanzinari Brufolosi" (the Zitty Fanboys) towards Cattivik and, in one story, a huge, ugly Fangirl who kidnaps Cattivik and forces him to draw a story for her (which is a parody of Stephen King's Misery).
• Absurdly Sharp Claws: Played for laughs when the titular character gets cut to ribbons by a lion.
• Answers to the Name of God: A variant in Cattivik in Paradiso. When Cattivik steals St. Peter's robe jumps off a cloud to parachute back to Earth, God exclaims "By God! That is... by Me!"
• BFG: Cattivik sometimes wields large guns in his misfits.
• Big Red Devil: While the devils in Un'avventura infernale aren't visibly red, since the comic is grayscale, they're otherwise stout, hairy humanoids provided with pointed horns, goatees, bat wings, goat hooves, arrowhead-tipped tails, and pitchforks.
• Black Comedy Rape: In one story he's captured by an amorous male Gorilla and he later comes back wearing lingerie, a wig and a bra. Sometimes he gets dragged away by some ugly women (or gay men) with amorous intents.
• Boob-Based Gag: Used sometimes. Most notably in one story (in which everything is white because of a lazy artist strong blizzard) where he lands from a great height on something soft and warm. This is revealed to be the large bosom of a streetwalker. In one story he even ends up with two fake breasts which look like beach balls (complete with plug).
• Book Dumb: It is implied several times that Cattivik never had a proper education, and yet he's able to build complex machines using scrapped material.
• Bowdlerise: The animated series is a good deal less violent, vulgar and toilet-humor prone than the original comic. For example in the story the first episode is based on, Cattivik finally manages to get the huge, menacing night warden to leave the mall he was guarding by accidentally showing him his vermin-infested handkerchief, causing him to run away in disgust at the sight of cockroaches. In the tv episode, the warden simply leaves the mall on his own, with no explanation given.
• Brick Joke: An early story opens with Cattivik stealing a bone from a little puppy. Near the end, when he's mistaken for a rabid dog by a near-blind dog catcher, he finds himself with the puppy he robbed... and his big, nastier brother.
• By the Lights of Their Eyes: The story "Black Out" happens during a black out (happening exactly during a moonless night with cloudy weather), leaving only the eyes and mouths of the involved characters visible in the darkness.
• Camp Gay: Stylist is portrayed this way. Also Prince Charming.
• Catchphrase: "Uaz Uaz Uaz" (Cattivik's traditional laugh). Also, the words "Brivido, Terrore, Raccapriccio" (Chills, Terror and Bloodcurdling) repeated at the start of each story.
• Comedic Sociopathy: It usually derives from Cattivik's Amusing Injuries.
• Cranial Eruption: A common result of Cattivik applying his trusty hammer to use, or, more commonly, brute force applied to Cattivik's head. Sometimes they even branch, like cacti.
• Cranial Plate Ability: Played for Laughs in a story where the person Cattivik just hammered on the head happens to have a 10 cm thick steel plate under his hat.
• Crapsack World: The world where Cattivik operates is rather bleak, dark and depressing.
• Crashing Through the Harem: Has this happen to him a couple of times and both times gets savagely beaten for his trouble.
• Creepy Crossdresser: Only once has it been voluntary, every other time it's usually part of a Humiliation Conga.
• Collector of the Strange: "Battista il Collezionista" (which sounds like "Hector the Collector") IS this trope: you name it, he collects it. Including rocks, lockets, couches, fish, Muslim's erotic magazines, hounds, carnivorous plants, bombs and mines, weapons, blowpipes, hot air balloons, ropes, caves, gems and even experience.
• Depending on the Writer: The art style and Cattivik's general behaviour change frequently.
• Devil's Pitchfork: In Un'avventura infernale, the devils in Hell use tridents with flame-shaped tips to prod along the sinners as they work on their assigned labors.
• Door Dumb: The aptly-named story The Door had Cattivik trying and failing to open a door. In a mild subversion he both pulled and pushed, but then he escalated to all sorts of mad attempts (ending with a nuke) without even suspecting it could be a sliding door. The door remained closed. It turned out it was a sliding door and wasn't even locked.
• Dragged into Drag: A couple of story endings have Cattivik being forcibly put into drag to act as a prostitute to cover his debts.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Cattivik from earlier stories and strips was actually much more successful and threatening than his later appearance. For example, in one case he's shown entering into a villa, munching on a bone while implying that he ate the watchdogs and then chased the armed guards away for some post-meal exercise. In more recent adaptations, he's lucky to avoid being mauled by a single dog in the first place.
• Exit, Pursued by a Bear: Actually never a bear, but rather an angry mob, crocodiles, hounds, and sharks. In a particularly funny story, he poisons (using the foul stench from the sewers) a ball... of all kinds of policemen and such. He almost gets away in time.... only to be spotted and chased by a ludicrously large (about five whole panels in size) mob of policemen, firefighters, scouts, anti-riot troops, dog units, and so on.
• Exposition Intuition: Played for Laughs in a story where the narration boxes turn against the protagonists. One of the characters, calling himself "The Professor", explains to everybody else what happened and how they need to fight for their life, "like in movies". When asked what he is a professor of, he admits he's a junior high gym coach... But he's watched a lot of movies.
• Expy: Cattivik is one of Diabolik. The Everyguy is one for Fantozzi.
• Extreme Omnivore: He can eat almost anything, usually disgusting stuff, including a salamander filled with fly eggs and fried in spider grease with oregano.
• Fan Disservice: Whenever he appears naked. Also many female characters are quite ugly.
• Fat Bastard: Cattivik is rather portly, though in earlier volumes he had a leaner shape.
• Fire and Brimstone Hell: In Un'avventura infernale, Cattivik and a Dante lookalike fall down an old well to end up in a cavernous Hell, where sinners attend to a variety of corporeal punishments under the supervision of hairy, bat-winged, pitchfork-wielding devils. He manages to escape... by going back up through Mount Etna.
• Fluffy Cloud Heaven: In Cattivik in Paradiso, Cattivik reaches the Pearly Gates by means of a hot air balloon to find a cloudy paradise populated by robed and haloed blessed souls. After a few misadventures, including trying to steal the halos of the blessed after mistaking them for gold and a brief stint leading the Heavenly choir, he steals St. Peter's robe and uses it to parachute back to Earth.
• Fluffy Tamer: He once considered keeping a gator as a pet, and in one story he managed to subvert his status as Butt-Monkey by beating a large, mean gorilla to a pulp.
• Funetik Aksent: In an exaggeration of Milan's dialect, Cattivik often omits the last vowel of each word.
• Gamebook: Parodied in a story set in Friday 17th, a day of bad luck, in which Cattivik finds himself in a story where the reader can choose what happens to him... but pretty much no matter the choice, he still suffers the very same misfortunes, ending with either him Squashed Flat against a wall or unwillingly suffer a gender-reassignment surgery.
• Gender Bender: In one story he ends up in the operating room of a hospital and is later seen with flowing blond hair, skirt and big breasts.
• Hidden Depths: Even though Cattivik can barely read or write, he can conjure up weird contraptions or a Thememobile using only whatever junk he can find in the sewers he lives in.
• Horrifying the Horror: In The Haunted House, Cattivik learns (from the narrator's lengthy introduction) that the titular ghost-infested mansion may host a treasure and promptly barges in, treating all the supernatural encounters with mild interest or disdain (picking up a ghost as his new bedsheet and taking away most of a skeleton's bones for supper) and eventually angrily tries to force the monsters to confess where the treasure is. He ends up destroying the place, forcing the ghouls to leave forever.
• Human Head on the Wall: In one early story, Cattivik sneaks in the mansion of an eccentric old baron who was a prolific tiger hunter and now that he's retired he's taken the hobby to hunt down thieves and criminals who break into his house and mount their heads on a wall, and tries to do the same to Cattivik. Played for laughs by the end of the story, where Cattivik's head is seen mounted on the wall... but since the baron's butler accidentally died during the hunt, he has hired Cattivik as the new butler and the trophy thing is part-time.
• Humiliation Conga: Being beaten to a pulp is quite common. Other fates include being thrown in jail, captured by a group of Boy Scouts, sealed up somewhere, exposed as a freak, forced to work as a (female) prostitute and even married to a Camp Gay stylist (as his bride, no less).
• Iron Butt-Monkey: Cattivik, every single time. Also his usual victim, the Solitomino (Everyguy).
• Jerkass: Cattivik. Also some minor characters, like other punks or the Skinheads.
• Karma Houdini: Usually the other delinquents or characters who trick Cattivik.
• Killer Rabbit: The "Combat Dog" harassing Cattivik in an early story is a small, defenseless-looking big-nosed pooch who can stil Judo-throw Cattivik like nothing, hit him on the head with a large sledgehammer and, when formally challenged, pull out a pistol bigger than he is and shoot Cattivik.
• Lazy Artist: In-Universe, the story Blizzard (which is composed of identical white panels and dialog balloons) ends with a discussion between the editor and the artist, the former accusing the latter of being this while the latter claims that he really did all the drawings, but then colored everything white "for coherence".
• Living Crashpad: Happens twice in the same story. The first time he lands on something "bouncy" revealed to be the breasts of a prostitute. Later he's sent flying again and this time lands on something soft and hairy, revealed to be the back of a polar bear in the zoo.
• Looks Like Orlok: Surprisingly, in the Dracula parody story, the count "Nosfigatu" looks more like Nosferatu. And, is an even greater Butt-Monkey than Cattivik himself.
• Low-Speed Chase: In one story, Cattivik is chased by a stubborn carabiniere, and the fast chase slowly declines to a walking pace, then to an agonising crawl.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Cattivik often ends up like this, only to scoop himself back together a few seconds later.
• The Mafia: Usually composed of two identical men with fedoras and moustaches.
• Mugging the Monster:
  • It happens to him from time to time. Subverted once where he flees screaming seeing a very tall, angry man who is actually a balloon wielded by a little kid.
  • Or when he mugs a normal-looking man who promptly reacts by beating him to a pulp in order to subvert a stereotype.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Occasionally invoked whenever Cattivik's hijinks involve a celebrity.
• No Fourth Wall: Sometimes the narrator's loud introductions wake Cattivik up from his slumber. Sometimes, Cattivik actually argues with the authors of the story.
• No One Could Survive That!: He's survived being clubbed, slashed, impaled, squashed, bisected, diced, shot, poisoned, eaten and even nuked.
• Our Werebeasts Are Different: One early story has Cattivik targeted by the "Werehog", a verbose, horny Pig Man who tries to contaminate Cattivik by biting him, but eventually annoys him enough that he gets smacked in the face with a slab of steel, returning back to normal.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: Let's just say the whole comic.
• Refuge in Audacity
• Rube Goldberg Device: Cattivik occasionally builds one, and a whole episode was dedicated to explaining how one of them worked.
• Running Gag: His stench, which is so strong it can cause even mummies, zombies and monsters to puke.
• Sequential Symptom Syndrome: Cattivik spends an entire story suffering the infernal and disgusting symptoms of a virus as soon as a doctor on television mentions them. He eventually tries to stop them by swallowing a whole truckload of medicines, but it backfires horribly as the virus had exhausted its life cycle anyway.
• Shout-Out: In Un'avventura infernale, the sinners in Hell include a number of other comic book robbers and thieves — namely, Stanislao Moulinsky, the Beagle Boys and the Dalton Brothers.
• Status Quo Is God: No matter what happens to him, in the next story he's back on his feet in the sewers on another objective.
• Summon Bigger Fish: Done with weapons in a hooligan themed episode. He first mugs a large hooligan with a kitchen knife, and the guy just pulls out a huge knife and dice him. Then he tries his luck against another hooligan (this time with a gun), put the other one pulls out a rocket launcher. The last time he attempts it with a small cannon, the "victim" is a small band of delinquents with ''a Tank!''.
• Take Our Word for It: The blizzard episode where everything's white. At one point he runs into a colossal Ice sculpture representing the October's Revolution and the assault on the Czar's palace complete with horses, soldiers and any possible kind of minute decorations.
  Cattivik: I'm shocked with awe and surprise! It's a pity that you can't see this!
• Take That!:
  • In a parody of A Christmas Carol, Cattivik witness a trio of skinheads brutalizing his weak future self and asks the Ghost of Future Christmases why he got old while they're still young and fit. The latter bluntly tells him that everyone knows that the mother of idiots is always pregnant.
  • In the parody of Dante's Inferno, the Dante-lookalike is hired by Satan as the new tormentor of the circle of lazy students.
• Tempting Fate: And it never misses a chance to bite him in the ass.
• Those Wacky Nazis: In one episode (an homage to Sturmtruppen) Cattivik finds a group of really old, senile nazi soldiers who are unaware that the war is over.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: In at least a couple episodes (both involving a psychiatrist) he manages to finally steal something without getting torn to pieces.
• Unsettling Gender-Reveal: One episode has Cattivik tricked by a pimp into taking a rather homely and vulgar prostitute home with him (despite the fact that Cattivik has no idea how to use her to make money). When "she" eventually finds out he's a penniless thief and has had enough "she" removes her clothing and Fake Boobs, revealing himself to be an actual man in drag. Downplayed, as it wasn't really hard to see coming.
  Prostitute: "Well yeah, I'm a man! What, there's a law against it?"
• Working on the Chain Gang: In Un'avventura infernale, the sinners in Hell are sentenced either to smashing rocks with hammers or to hauling the resulting rubble around in minecarts.
• Wrong Parachute Gag: Subverted when the hero gets the wrong parachute but still manages to land safely on a plane (don't worry, It Makes Sense in Context).
• You All Look Familiar: The Solitomino's (actually his surname) family members share the same traits.

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