Cartoons meet horror: I conigli rosa uccidono (Dylan Dog)

Eddie Valiant and Roger Rabbit

Comedy cartoons are well known for their own laws of physics that let the characters do comically exaggerated actions without any important injuries: this concept is called slapstick comedy. The most famous examples of slapstick can be found in the Looney Toons, Tom & Jerry and Popeye the sailor man short films. 

And this is only a part of the cameos!

What would happen if cartoon characters coexisted with humans? In 1988 the film Who framed Roger Rabbit, directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Bob Hoskins, Christopher Lloyd and Charles Fleischer, proposes a world where humans and toons live together: they act in their short films like the human actors, but they still follow the slapstick rules. This incredible cult movie from the late 80s was created with a mixed technique: they filmed the live action scenes, then the animators added the toons, creating the interactions on screen between the two. The film is full of cameos of very famous characters, and one of the few occasions in which the biggest Disney and Warner Bros characters meet.

Cover for Dylan Dog n.24

A few months later in the same year, in Italy another answer to the question was given from a horror angle: Dylan Dog (we talked about the comic in the past) proposed in the newsstands issue 24 titled I conigli rosa uccidono (Pink rabbits kill), written by Luigi Mignacco with art by Luigi Piccatto and Cesare Valeri. The protagonist creature is the very famous animated bunny Pink Rabbit, homage and parody of Looney Toons and the slapstick principles. Pink Rabbit is presented as a fictional character in the world of Dylan Dog, produced by the Sandy Sidney studio (obvious parody of Disney). Incredibly, Pink Rabbit arrives in the real world, and tries to play with his new "meat friends" in the same way as in his native world: violent slapstick gags! Unfortunately humans don't follow the same laws of physics as toons do, so you can imagine the brutal and splatter results of his games, and his perplexities: why do his new friends not recover, are they fragile? 

Pink Rabbit finished playing
with his animator Frank

When the wife of one the main animators entrusts Dylan with the case of his murder (the husband used to have nightmare about Pink Rabbit and he recently saw him in real life), a series of events leads Dylan into Pink Rabbit's animated world. However, like with many other memorable stories of the character, the narration gives us two explanations, a supernatural one and a more worldly one, and one doesn't  exclude the other! Did Pink Rabbit really exist or was he a mask used by his creator to commit murders? In an incredible plot twist, both are true, when Groucho reveals to Dylan he saw his fight against Pink Rabbit on TV. The existence of the toon world is further tackled in issue 107, Il paese delle ombre colorate (The land of colored shadows) in 1995. Here is explored the animated world of Jumpo (Pink Rabbit's real name) and we understand that in reality the rabbit isn't so bad, he simply doesn't  understand the world of meat people.

Cover for Dylan Dog n.107

Jumpo got two other stories dedicated to him, in Dylan Dog's two secondary titles: in 2009 he stars in I conigli rosa colpiscono ancora (Pink rabbits strike again) in the annual Almanacco della Paura and in 2018 in I conigli rosa muoiono (Pink rabbits die) in the trimestral title Color Fest dedicated to stories in color. The tetralogy written by Luigi Mignacco gifted us with one of the most interesting and memorable characters of the series, and one of my favourites that I hope to see appear in other stories in the future.