YMMV / Diabolik

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Diabolik has a in-universe franchise and relative fandom, generating these. Hilarity Ensues every time it's brought to bear: only Eva and Altea can tolerate their own alternative interpretations (but not those of their beloved).
• Awesome Music: The adaptations have more than a few examples:
  • The animated series offers the American intro and the Italian one.
  • The 2021 film provides La Profondità degli Abissi ("The Abyss' Depth") and Pam Pum Pam, both by Manuel Agnelli.
  • The 2022 film Ginko Attacks! has Se Mi Vuoi ("If You Want Me") by Diodato.
  • The 2023 film "Diabolik, Who Are You?" has "Ti Chiami Diabolik" ("Your Name Is Diabolik" by Calibro 35.
• Catharsis Factor: Every time Diabolik goes after the criminals worse than him and wipes them out.
• Complete Monster: Diabolik himself may be a ruthless master thief, but he operates with a level of honor and has a set of unbreakable standards. As a result, the comic has introduced some pure evil monsters for him to fight at times:
  • Federico is the ambitious Duke of Vallenberg who is aiming for control over the kingdom of Benglait. Creating the terrorist organisation the Grey Ravens, Federico has them provoke a Civil War to cause countless deaths. Marrying Atlea to attempt to claim the throne but failing to do so because of Benglait becoming a republic, Federico fakes his death and orchestrates a series of horrific terrorist attacks upon the kingdom. When Diabolik and Ginko interfere with his plans, Federico continues with his onslaughts and launches an attack on Atlea, so he could return from his supposed demise and have the Grey Ravens convert Benglait into a fascist state with him as ruler.
  • Mr. Logan is the depraved CEO of a pharmaceutical company who's only out for his monetary gain. Purchasing a Synthetic Plague and its vaccine, Logan then unleashes the virus onto the civilian population, killing countless innocents and causing a mass panic. Logan's intention is to then "discover" the vaccine and use it to be able to rake in money from the population and appear as the hero who saved them all.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: A few:
  • Filippo, Gastone and Elietta, the titular characters from the story "Crumbs for Unknown Persons", proved so popular they returned with a major role in "The Heist of the Year 2,000".
  • Anselma, Loredana and Angelica, a trio of scammers from "The Three Nymphs", became just as popular for, among other things, getting one over Diabolik by complete accident and not taking advantage of it, enough that the title of their debut story became their Fan Nickname and they became semi-recurring characters.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In the story Nel Tunnel della Pazzia (Inside the Tunnel of Madness) Elisabeth Gay claimed her hate for Diabolik was born not from Diabolik's driving her to madness but by him choosing Eva as accomplice and partner instead of herself. Her words become harsher after reading Nei Sotterranei di Clerville (Inside Clerville's Underground), that has a long flashback sequence of the times when Diabolik's true face was still unknown and Elisabeth his lover and Unwitting Pawn: the sequence shows that Diabolik did consider her as a possible future partner and actually tested her, with her proving her abilities but accidentally betraying his trust, leading Diabolik to look somewhere else for possible accomplices.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Eva is a very good singer, and used to be a professional singer before marrying. Then in 2012 Italian singer Alessandra Amoroso showed up at a contest dressed in black and with the same iconic hairstyle as Eva...
• Memetic Badass: In Italy everyone knows he can take the looks of everyone thanks to his masks (universally known in Italy as "Diabolik's masks").
  • Lampshaded by the two-parter "A Cursed Island"-"Escape from the Island", where we find out that the natives of the island of Bo-Tang (who provide him with the resin he needs to make his masks permanent) call him Ri-Mau, "The Man with Many Faces and Many Souls" and consider him an emissary of their god precisely because of his masks.
• Memetic Mutation: Due Diabolik's popularity, a character in Italian media has a name that ends in "-ik" is either a villain or an antihero, with the suffix "-ika" reserved for female antiheroes.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The comic caused great controversy in Italy when it first debuted, because, being a comic book, was automatically assumed to be child-friendly, nevermind the series' title derived from the Italian word for "devilish" or that the first story was titled "The King of Terror". That first story features a series of gruesome murders (none seen on-page, but bloody nonetheless), a woman seeing her husband murdered and being Driven to Madness twice, and an implacable criminal chasing a sympathetic character to kill him all to commit a theft, has the main character seduce a woman for a one-night-stand just because he was in the mood (and actually shows the aftermath of them having sex), and ends with Ginko shooting a group of scarecrows in the belief Diabolik was hidden in one, leaving when no corpse fell down, and then one of the scarecrows showed Diabolik's terrifying eyes and started bleeding. Eventually protests from worried parents turned it more kid-friendly...But the series was still about a knife-happy criminal who could be anyone thanks to Latex Perfection and it did not shy away from the implications, before eventually returning closer to its roots.

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