Other than a few words, I don't know any Italian: I dearly wish I did, however, when I'm confronted with three issues of the periodical Dario Argento Presenta Profondo Rosso (Dario Argento Presents Deep Red), a black-and-white, horror-comics-anthology digest, circa 1991.[1] For those unfamiliar with his work, Dario Argento directs horror films and is best known for his color-saturated, violently hallucinatory gialli from the '70s such as Deep Red and Suspiria (giallo is an Italian thriller/mystery genre, known for its stylization, music and grand-guignol theatrics. It took its name from the yellow covers of pulp novels). 
It is clear that many of the stories in the periodicals are based on or take from films in some way: some are straight-up adaptations of Hammer horror flicks, and others, such as "The Crimes of Edgar Allan Poe," written by N. Tulli and drawn by S. Muratori, seem to be riffing along the same lines as Argento's 1990 film Two Evil Eyes. (I'm not sure how much licensing came into play for this, but the anthology's creators seemed to be able to merrily cherry-pick any horror character they would like to use from a variety of media.) 
Many of the pieces are heavily EC-influenced in art and plotting and/or are DC horror comics reprints, by the likes of Gil Kane and Joe Orlando, from titles such as House of Mystery. By the art alone I was able to follow most of the goings-on of the pirates, abusive husbands, werewolves, sexy women and ghosts that populated them. The Stella Holmes serial appears to be newish material (when these periodicals came out), anchoring the reprints, and was drawn by a different writer-artist team each issue, which resulted in an inconsistent character model: by and large, though, she is drawn with a flat-planed face, a style not unusual for Italian comics (as an aside, an Italian comics influence can be easily detected in Charles Burns' art). Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2008
