«Voglio chiamarlo col suo nome». Sulla lingua di Johnny Freak (Dylan Dog #81)

The paper examines Johnny Freak, the 81st episode of the comic series starring the «investigator of nightmares» Dylan Dog. The volume, considered by both critics and readers to be one of the masterpieces of Italian comics, is characterised by a wide lexical variety, which, thanks also to rapid and sudden changes of tone, ranges in the space of a few balloons, from colloquial to standard Italian, from popular Italian to the so-called giovanilese. If one adds to the aforementioned the equally variegated spectrum of typically oral morphosyntactic phenomena reproduced in the book's balloons, it is not daring to state that Johnny Freak represents a portrait of the mechanisms at work in the Italian language during the first half of the 1990s. At the same time, the volume also proves to be well ahead of its time in the reflection it imposes on the theme it deals with (physical disability), to which readers are called through the faithful reproduction of the linguistic uses of speakers, often brutals when related to issue addressed.