In Search of Old Dylan Dogs: What Polish Comic Artists Found in Italy

Comicon_dol-fot-FB-COMICON.jpg, default, Krzysztof Ostrowski, Bartosz Szytbor & Przemysław Truściński with Italian friends after their panel at Comicon Bergamo 2026, photo: FB / Comicon

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Bergamo, Italy, 26-28 June – a dozen or so Polish artists, one Italian heatwave, and a country that has never once needed convincing that comics are art.

The first properly telling thing anyone said to me at Bergamo Comic Con had nothing to do with Poland.

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Krzysztof Ostrowski at Comicon Bergamo 2026, photo: FB / BWA Jelenia Góra

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I’d found Krzysztof Ostrowski – comics artist, musician, publisher, and the sort of person who answers questions in complete sentences with the air of someone slightly amused that you asked – near the Polish stand. He’d been in the only-partly air-conditioned building about two hours. As we stood there sweating, I asked if he had seen much of the festival.

‘Not much, because I’m here for like two hours,’ he said. ‘I went to look for some old “Dylan Dogs”, but I didn't find anything right now. But I will look more.’

A Polish artist flown in as an official guest of an international festival, given time at a stand, his work at an exhibition and in a catalogue, and the first thing he does is go rummaging through the back-issue bins for second-hand Bonelli horror comics from the 1980s.

Italy is the other country that got it right

Everyone knows about France. The neuvième art, the Angoulême festival, the Ministry of Culture handing out grants to people who draw talking animals, bandes dessinées shelved in bookshops next to Proust rather than in a spinner rack by the tills. It’s pretty clear they’ve truly come to appreciate comics.

Italy did the same thing, roughly in parallel, and gets a fraction of the credit.

Comic book cover of 'Corto Maltese: Una ballata del mare salato' by Hugo Pratt, featuring an illustration of the main character in a captain's uniform. — Cover of ‘Corto Maltese: Una Ballata del Mare Salato’, photo: Wikipedia

The evidence is fairly overwhelming once you start listing it. Diabolik, launched in 1962 by two sisters, Angela and Luciana Giussani, who essentially invented an entire genre – the fumetto nero – and sold it to commuters at newsstands. Tex Willer, running continuously since 1948 and still shifting numbers that would make an American publisher weep. Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese, which is taught in schools and hung in galleries and is genuinely, unarguably literature. Milo Manara, infamous for his erotic style, has even been hired by Marvel to draw covers, presumably while the legal department lies down in a darkened room.

Comic book cover for 'Dylan Dog: I Vampiri', showing a terrified man screaming in front of a bat-like creature with fangs. — Cover of ‘Dylan Dog i Vampiri’, photo: Wikipedia

And Ostrowski’s quarry, Dylan Dog – Tiziano Sclavi’s ‘nightmare investigator’, launched in 1986, which at its 1990s peak was selling somewhere between half a million and a million copies a month. Umberto Eco once said, more or less, that he could read the Bible, Homer and Dylan Dog for days on end without getting bored. Yes, Umberto Eco. About a horror comic sold at a train station.

More recently there’s Gipi, whose unastoria was shortlisted for the Strega Prize in 2014 – Italy’s most prestigious literary award, the one that goes to novels – which is the sort of thing that simply hasn’t happened elsewhere. And Zerocalcare, who has managed the trick of being both a cult underground cartoonist from a Roman suburb and a fixture at the top of the general bestseller charts.

Then there’s Lucca Comics & Games, which is not ‘a big European convention’ but the biggest comics festival in Europe and, by most counts, among the largest in the world – usually ranked just behind Tokyo’s Comiket.

Italy, in short, decided a long time ago that drawing pictures in sequence was a respectable thing for an adult to do with their life. Which is exactly what makes it interesting to drop a dozen Polish artists into the middle of it.

Poland’s modesty problem

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Bartosz Sztybor at the Hugo Awards ceremony, October 2023, photo: FB / Polskie Stowarzyszenie Komiksowe

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Bartosz Sztybor is in charge of franchise at CD Projekt Red, which means he handles everything Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 that isn’t a game – comics, board games, animation. He’s also, as of 2023, a Hugo Award winner. He’d clearly been doing sums while walking around the hall.

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When I’m here in Bergamo they have four or five or even six comic book schools here in Italy, and right now the biggest American publishers like Marvel, DC – almost every comic book series is made by an Italian artist. And I would dream about something like that for Poland.

He’s not exaggerating. Look at the credits on a month of Marvel output and you’ll find Sara Pichelli, who co-created Miles Morales, as well as Gabriele Dell'Otto, Simone Bianchi, Stefano Caselli and Giuseppe Camuncoli. Italy has spent 40 years slowly building a training pipeline – the Scuola Internazionale di Comics, the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna, the Milan comics school, Disney’s own Italian studio system that produces Topolino every single week – and now exports draughtsmen the way it exports coffee machines.

Sztybor’s diagnosis of why Poland doesn’t do the same isn’t about talent. It’s about temperament.

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I think we have amazing artists, we have very talented people, but I think still there are some issues or fear with promoting ourselves. I was trying for six or seven years, every year going to the same con and showing my portfolio. And I remember when I was talking to my super talented artist friends – why aren’t you sending your portfolio? And they were like, yeah, I sent once, no one answered. So that's it. But why not try again and again?

Kasia Nie, the first Polish woman to draw for Marvel, had said almost exactly the same thing an hour earlier, unprompted, without either of them having spoken.

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Americans are very individualistic. They are not afraid of speaking well of themselves. In Poland you talk about yourself like you are someone better – I did this and it’s great – and it’s usually taken as being full of yourself. That may be like a generational trauma or something. Our country went through some bad stuff. I guess that’s kind of shaped us as a society.

Only Przemysław ‘Trust’ Truściński, who has been doing this since the first Polish comics convention in 1991, seemed to have decided to opt out of the national condition entirely. ‘We leave modesty aside,’ he announced, holding up the Italian edition of his book. ‘If we have something to boast about, we boast about it to the max.’

What Italy actually does to Polish books

Fugazi Music Club – Marcin Podolec – Image Gallery

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Here’s the part that surprised me, though it shouldn’t have.

Nikola Kucharska already has three books out in Italian – The Lost Island, Animals That Disappeared, and her dragon book. She’s been over to Italy twice before, to the Florence book festival and the Turin book fair, and ran workshops to full rooms both times.

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Dragons in particular go down a storm in Italy. I can see that these books fall on exceptionally fertile ground here. I hope Bergamo isn't the last time

Marcin Podolec’s Fugazi Music Club – a drawn documentary about a Warsaw music venue that existed for just 11 months and, by all accounts, never once stopped – was published in Italy by BAO Publishing, which is about as good an Italian home as a graphic novel can hope for.

And Truściński’s Andzia, his illustrated cycle built from the surreal poems of a bishop writing a century ago, has come out here as Ania, on the reasonable grounds that it simply sounds better in Italian.

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I’m boasting about ‘Andzia’, I’m boasting about ‘Ania’ in the Italian version, and I’m very happy that Italian readers and viewers like it so much. Polish surrealism at every level you can imagine.

Andzia – Przemysław Truściński & Bishop Piotr Mańkowski – Image Gallery

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He was also pretty clear about what was pulling the crowds. ‘The Italians hold The Witcher in enormous esteem – not that this is any surprise. Our Polish stand here is boiling over with that joy around the Witcher projects.’

Even the artists with nothing translated found the reception baffling in a nice way. Kasia Babis sold copies of Breadcrumbs: Coming of Age in Post-Soviet Poland – in English, in Italy, to Italians. ‘I’m very positively surprised,’ she said. ‘It’s not only in a foreign language but also about another foreign country.’ But she then added something that probably explains it: ‘Comic Con, all the geeky stuff, manga, anime, fantasy – this is very much my style. Everything feels exactly like at all the festivals in Poland. I’m at home.’

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Kasia Babis painting at the Polish-Verse stand, Comicon Bergamo 2026, photo: Culture.pl

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The Polish cosplay duo Bish & Talon, sweltering inside armour built from EVA foam, 3D prints and several coats of what was, at the time of purchase, one of the darkest black paints available in Europe, said much the same. First time in Italy as convention guests: ‘We feel very liked and very welcome here.’

Kasia Nie put her finger on why these trips are worth more than the sales figures suggest. ‘It’s something different when you go somewhere on holiday – you’re a tourist, you don’t speak with locals. Here I meet people I wouldn’t meet otherwise. There’s a lot of fake information, a lot of manipulations on the internet. Sometimes you have to go somewhere, talk with people, and you get a broader view of how it is in the world.’

The Italian back door to Japan

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Kasia Babis, Basia Majkowska & Kasia Nie during a panel at Comicon Bergamo 2026, photo: Culture.pl

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Which brings me to the panel on the first afternoon, and one of the most delightful things I watched happen all weekend.

Kasia Babis, Basia Majkowska and Kasia Nie were on stage together, being interviewed by an Italian host through a translator. At some point, the conversation turned to anime and within about half a minute all three of them were confirming the same thing to one another with visibly rising delight: that they had grown up watching Japanese cartoons in Italian.

Neither the host nor his translator had any idea. And their surprise and confusion weren’t down to any language barrier.

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Captain Hawk (Captain Tsubasa) Ending - NTW/Polonia1

The mechanism, for those who weren’t 9 years old in Poland in 1995, goes roughly like this.

By the late 1970s, Italy was importing and dubbing anime at a scale that dwarfed most of Europe. UFO Robot Goldrake landed in 1978 and detonated, followed by a long tail of robot and adventure series – Yattaman among them – that filled the afternoon schedules for a decade. By the early 1990s, Italian broadcasters were sitting on one of the largest dubbed anime libraries on the continent, complete with Italianised character names, Italian episode titles and those unmistakable Italian theme songs, a great many of them sung by Cristina D’Avena.

And in 1993, a Sardinian media entrepreneur called Nicola Grauso launched a television station in Poland: Polonia 1. Its schedule was substantially an Italian package, shipped wholesale, and broadcast in Poland the cheap way – a single Polish lektor reading flatly over the top of the existing soundtrack and voices.

Which meant that if you were a Polish kid in the mid-1990s watching a Japanese cartoon, what you were physically hearing underneath the Polish voice-over was Italian. The character was called whatever an Italian dubbing studio had decided to call him in 1981. The song over the opening credits was often in Italian, and you learned it by heart phonetically without ever knowing what it meant.

Japan made it. Italy translated it, renamed it, and sang over it. Poland took delivery.

Which is a very long way of saying that when a Polish artist stands in a hall in Bergamo feeling inexplicably at home, there may be a reason for it that predates the stand, the exhibition and the invitation by about 30 years.

Showing the best of Poland in Italy

Poster for Comicon Bergamo 2026 featuring an illustration of various comic characters gathered around a table with drinks, titled 'Polska a Bergamo: Il fumetto polacco contemporaneo'. — Poster promoting the Polish exhibition at Comicon Bergamo 2026, photo: Comicon.it

The Polish presence at Bergamo wasn’t just a few walls of framed pages. It was a working shopfront called the Polish-Verse, where the artists sat for three days signing things, drawing things, and selling comic books. Six of them had spent part of the run painting a series of canvases, which went up on the stand as they were finished.

Nikola Kucharska spent enough time behind the table to watch it working.

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The comics we brought as the Polish delegation definitely catch the eye out on that trade floor. And when I’m sitting at the stand I can see how many people come over, how it sparks their interest, and that they want to buy them. It’s heartening. We’ve got something to show off, and something to be proud of.

The stand also produced an incredibly happy accident, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Krzysztof Gawronkiewicz – a man who has been drawing professionally since the early 1990s, with pages from Mikropolis and Il Cinefilo (Kinoman in Polish) hanging on the exhibition wall nearby – had spent two days wanting to draw one of the many cosplayers running around and not doing it.

‘I've been coming here for two days,’ he explained, setting up, ‘but I'm too shy to come up and ask someone to pose for me.’

He eventually managed it with Talon after I introduced them – one half of the award-winning Polish cosplay duo Bish and Talon, who were at Bergamo judging the costume competition and running a panel on how to plan a build so you aren’t assembling it the night before. Talon sat down in full Darkest Dungeon armour – roughly 80 separately-angled pieces of foam and 3D print – and discovered that modelling is harder than it looks.

‘I've never modelled before,’ he said, not moving. ‘I'm trying not to break anything, and to look a bit dignified. At least just a bit.’ A pause. ‘And it's hard, because I’m usually a dork.’

It took about half an hour. Neither of them had met before that afternoon.

The exhibition proper – a selection of contemporary Polish comics – was put together by Paweł Machłajewski of the BWA Gallery in Jelenia Góra, which has been shown in Angoulême, Barcelona, Brussels, Paris, Tokyo, Moscow and Strasbourg. It’s their second Italian outing, after a show of historical Polish comics at Comicon in Naples in 2017 – organised with many of the same people, which is how these things tend to work.

The catalogue has been translated into Italian in full – biographies, plus essays covering Polish comics from the 19th century through the communist decades, the collapse of the 1990s, and today. ‘Every Italian reader who gets hold of this catalogue,’ Machłajewski told me, ‘will be able to get to know the entire history of Polish comics in a nutshell.’

Not that a country being grown up about comics means it will hang anything you send it. Ostrowski, choosing which of his pages to submit, found the brief came with conditions.

‘There were some restrictions,’ he said. ‘No violence, no drugs, no sex. So I had to choose very wisely.’ He did, and it didn't entirely work. ‘A few of my panels were rejected...'

Narko – Dana Łukasińska & Krzysztof Ostrowski – Image Gallery

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Dr Michał Traczyk, who runs the University Library comics collection in Poznań – 33,000 volumes and growing – was straightforwardly delighted. ‘Every exhibition of Polish comics that leaves our country makes me happy. The more of them, the better for our comics.’

He also offered the assessment that I think most of the artists in Bergamo would heartily agree with:

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Polish comics today don’t lag behind what's happening in the world in any way. Our creators can compete with foreign ones perfectly comfortably.

Which they can. They just need to say so out loud slightly more often, ideally in a country where nobody’s ever thought it was an odd thing to want to do.

Ostrowski, incidentally, never did find his Dylan Dogs. He seemed entirely relaxed about it. ‘Right now it’s like 99% holidays, 1% work,’ he said. ‘It’s quite hot, but it’s summer. Holidays should be hot during the summer.’

Interviews conducted at Bergamo Comic Con, 26–27 June 2026. Quotes from Polish-language interviews translated by the author.

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krzysztof ostrowski

Bartosz Sztybor