There's some complicated cultural cross-pollination going on in Dark Horse's first issue of Dylan Dog. One of the most popular comic books in Italy, Dylan Dog is best-known in America for its cinematic adaptation, the peculiar, intriguing Cemetery Man, which starred a pre-stardom Rupert Everett as a zombie-killing cemetery worker. Set in England, the current comic-book incarnation of Dylan Dog finds the title character working as a supernatural private investigator who's hired by a murder suspect to uncover why her husband came back from the dead as a mindless zombie. In short, it's an Italian horror comic—inspired by American noir heroes and the zombie films of George Romero—that's been transplanted to a setting that takes advantage of English Gothic tropes, with a sidekick modeled after Groucho Marx thrown in for good measure. As such, Dylan Dog continues in the tradition of Italy's Bonelli comics, which have, since the end of WWII, taken American comic and pulp characters (in addition to whatever else struck the artists' fancy) and placed them in thick, novelistic comic books. But, sent back to America, does the comic-book equivalent of a spaghetti Western work? Based on this first issue, it works just fine. Creator and writer Tiziano Sclavi possesses a sharp, self-aware sense of humor and an ability to integrate it into an involving plot, while Angelo Stano's art captures the right mix of the iconic and the grotesque. Dylan Dog is the first in Dark Horse's series of Bonelli reprints and if the rest are as good, they should keep them coming.