Have you ever heard of Dick Drago?!?!

I guess you haven't.

Anyway, a brief introduction is needed.

Last Sunday my girlfiend and I went to a comics street market. There were lots of stands, with a huge variety of comics, most italian ones like Tex and Dylan Dog but also american (Marvel and DC superheroes), and mangas. Obviously, 99% of the stands was selling used comics, and some of them had old rarities. The market was pretty crowded, and lots of people (most of whom were in their thirties or above) were looking for old comics to complete their collections.
I was there mainly to go for a walk with my girlfriend, but I took advantage of the situation to look for some old Dylan Dog comics that are missing from my collection.
While I was looking for them in a shelf packed with comics, I hit on a strange comic, that I had neve seen before. The name was "Dick Drago". The strange thing was that, starting from the font used for the title, everyting looked very similar to Dylan Dog: horror comics with black and white drawings and a male, dark haired main character, same graphical layout, same cover color. Since It looked very "alternative" to me, and it was the first time I had seen It, I eventually decided to get it.
Once at home, I learned from some websites that Dick Drago was issued as a clone of Dylan Dog in 1994 (but only 11 issues camo out, than it ended): Dick Drago is a reporter from Belfast with paranormal powers, that travels around the world to write articles about strange facts.
Finally, some days ago I managed to read the copy that I bought, "Le tombe della luna piena", the second issue published.
I think that the most appropriate word to express my opinion about it is: whortless.
The drawings are not that bad, but dialogues are really horrible (sometimes there are even grammar mistakes).
The plot is trivial. It starts in medias res without giving an explanation of why Dick Drago was going in that place, and the plot seems not interesting at all. Then the climax rises and the story starts to become a little more interesting, but the end is so unoriginal and stupid...Even the attempt to copy the "open ending" from Dylan Dog is ridiculous.
On the internet I learned that Dick Drago is famous among Dylan Dog fans to be a such uninspired and careless imitation of Dylan Dog, that some of them ended up to "worship" it (ironically), considering it an example of trash clone comics.

Anyway, I'm glad to have bought it, though, since now I own a trash rarity from the nineties!

Where it all started

Hi everybody! 
My name is Daniele, but my friends call me Alf (yes, like the alien ant eater, but there's no connection with it)
I'm a 24 years-old guy from Turin, Italy.


As you may guess from the name of my blog, this place will be mainly devoted to one of my favourite hobbies: computer games. And since I'm a quite nostalgic guy, I'd like to talk about computer games belonging to my childhood and teenage. Basically, computer games from the past, so what is usually called "Retrogaming"


Since I don't have so many friends interested in this topic, I hope that I'll have the possibility to know other people that share the same passion through this blog.


As this is the first post, I really have to start...from the beginning. 


I've been playing computer games since a was a small kid. I don't remember exactly, but I think I was five or maximum six years old. All I remember is that one evening my dad came home with a couple of big boxes. "What's inside?" - I asked. "Our first personal computer" - he said. Actually, I didn't know exactly what that meant, but I would have discovered it soon.
It was a AMSTRAD 5286, equipped (if I remember well), with a 1 Mb hard drive and few Kb of ram.
My dad bought it for typing and accounting, and basically because a PC was "the new thing" at that time, and he was curious to try. From time to time he used to show me some computer games he got together with the pc, but I was just watching him playing (or better, trying to play).


One (maybe two?) years later, he got a newer PC - a 486 - and something happened.
It was mid October, just some weeks before my birthday. I had been asking for a R/C car as birthday present for a very long time. I really wanted a R/C car, but not a toy one: I craved for one with spark-ignition engine.
My parents were not 100% convinced, as - they said - apart from being a very expensive present, I had not so many opportunities to exploit it, since I had no place to play with it.
Moreover, since my dad knew I was also interested in his computer, he made me this proposal: instead of the R/C car they would have bought me a new display so that I could use his old PC.
I had no secondo thoughts: that year I got the display as birthday present, and with that my first personal computer EVER!


And this is how it all started.


Since then, I changed PC several times, passing from 1st generation of Pentium processors, to the i7 quad core that equips my present laptop. But my first PC - the AMSTRAD 286, will always be unforgettable for me. Actually, it came along with me in all these years, since I used it as support for the display.


Unfortunately, some months ago I moved to another place, and due to space limitations I had to get rid of it. 
I wish I wouldn't have done it. It's really such a a pity.

That's how it looked like. I like to wonder that someone picked it up from the dump and right now it's playing with it.




Image: mypccollection.altervista.org