In the 1960s, the fictional city of Clerville is terrorised by a mysterious and elusive thief. No one knows his identity or his face, only his name: Diabolik. The man behind the mask meets his partner and accomplice, Eva Kant. Adapted from a fumetto, or ltalian comic strip, Diabolik is a cult character, a sort of transgressive Fantomas rooted in the pop world of the 1960s. The Manetti brothers seized upon this to make Diabolik, the first in a series of ambitious films to follow, thus testifying to the good health of popular genre cinema in Italy.