Dante Alighieri and The Divine Comedy in Popular Culture - Animations, Comics, and Graphic Novels

Animations, Comics, and Graphic Novels

(Alphabetical by title)

  • In the 1946 Merrie Melodies cartoon Book Revue, starring Daffy Duck, the Big Bad Wolf falls into the book Dante's Inferno after hearing Frank Sinatra singing.
  • The short animation, Dante's Inferno Animated (2012), featuring Eric Roberts as Dante, is based on Dino di Durante's original paintings of Dante's Inferno.
  • Dante's Inferno: The Graphic Novel (2012) by Joseph Lanzara utilizes the 1857 illustrations by Gustave DorĂ© from Dante's Divine Comedy in the form of a comic book inspired by the poem.
  • The main antagonist of the first anime adaptation of the anime/manga series Fullmetal Alchemist (2001) is a woman named Dante, who controls seven homunculi that are named after the seven deadly sins and each of which represent one of the seven terraces of purgatorio. They also suffer deaths or injuries similar to the punishment associated with the terrace each is named after. The Gate in this series is visually represented by Rodin's sculpture The Gates of Hell.
  • In an episode of the animated comedy series Futurama titled "Hell is Other Robots (1999)", the character Bender is dragged to robot hell, the entrance of which is hidden in an abandoned carnival ride called "Inferno". In a musical sequence, the levels of hell are described, each level complete with ironic punishments.
  • Jimbo in Purgatory: being a mis-recounting of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy in pictures and un-numbered footnotes, a 33-page graphic novel by Gary Panter, an adaptation of Dante's Purgatorio (melded with Boccaccio's Decameron and a bit of Canterbury Tales, John Milton, John Dryden, and pop culture references).
  • DC/Vertigo comics' Kid Eternity (which premiered in Hit Comics #25, published by Quality Comics in December 1942.), in which Kid and his companion Jerry Sullivan travel to a Dante-inspired Hell to free a partner of Kid's. The structure of the comic also draws features from Dante's Inferno.
  • DC/Vertigo comics's Lucifer, based on characters from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, featuring aspects of a Dante-inspired Hell and Heaven, particularly the Primum Mobile and Nine sections of Hell.
  • Mickey's Inferno is a comic book adaptation written by Guido Martina and drawn by Angelo Bioletto featuring classic Disney characters including Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Donald Duck published by the then-Italian Disney comic book licensee Mondadori in the monthly Topolino from Oct. 1949 to March 1950. An English-language version appeared in Walt Disney's Comics and Stories #666 .
  • The anime, Saint Seiya, more necessarily in the arc "Hades Inferno" it has, not only personages, but all the structure of the hell based on the circles of Dante, but here being called as the 9th Prisons.
  • An issue of the first volume of comic book adaptations of Star Trek by DC Comics, "Hell in a Handbasket", involves Captain Kirk and his crew being subjected to a telepathic hallucination of Hell, as described in The Divine Comedy, when an ill telepath who was recently reading the book generates an illusion that turns the entire Enterprise- save for the bridge, due to its distance from him- into Hell, forcing the senior staff to descend through a Hell populated by crewmembers who have subconsciously 'judged' themselves to find the telepath so that Spock can mind-meld with him and restore his sense of reality.
  • Ty Templeton parodied Dante in his Stig's Inferno (1985-1986).
  • Neil Gaiman's The Sandman comic series features a heavily Dante-inspired Hell, including the woods of Suicide, the Malebolge, and the City of Dis. Lucifer is also imprisoned in Hell.
  • The visual novel and anime series Umineko no Naku Koro ni contains several elements from the Divine Comedy, including two characters named Beatrice (as the Golden Witch), Virgilia (as the Endless Witch) and the Stakes (Seven Deadly Sins).
    • The anime adaptation has an ending theme entitled La Divina Tragedia ~Makyoku~, named after the title La Divina Comedia. "Makyoku" is the opposite of "Shinkyoku", Divine Comedy's Japanese title.
  • The fourth Uncanny X-Men Annual, "Nightcrawler's Inferno", chronicles the descent of Doctor Strange and the X-Men into a facsimile of Hell based on Dante's Inferno, to rescue Nightcrawler from an illusion created by his adopted mother, who blames him for the death of his adopted brother (Unaware of the fact that Nightcrawler only killed his brother because the other man had become a murderer).

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