Review: El Diablo

Brian Azzarrello and Danijel Zezelj's 2001 Vertigo miniseries El Diablo represented one of several attempts to make use of the Robert Kanigher/Gray Morrow Western character with the colorful name, following Gerard Jones and Mike Parobek's 1989 effort to create a more superheroic version of the character and preceding Jai Nitz, Phil Hester and Ande Parks' 2008 effort to cast the character as an immortal spirit of vengeance/legacy character.

Azzarello's version of the character that appeared in these four issues--and the 2008 trade collecting them--technically fits in with the DC comics that preceded and followed, as the character acts as a vengeful, supernatural agent, but he's a particularly nasty one. In fact, he's so brutal and savage in his treatment of some of his victims that one could read this with the understanding that El Diablo is literally The Devil. Interestingly, he's not the protagonist of the story, and gets relatively little panel-time.

Towards the end of the second issue/chapter, when a posse that has set out in search of El Diablo are sitting around a campfire and telling stories about him, the name Lazarus Lane and his original origin story come up. But the character spends most of the story as a shadowy figure--bearing little more detail than you can see of him on that cover--that appears and disappears. The only lines he speaks are variations of "Hssss." He is seen in the distance, shooting people down impossibly fast. He often lingers just off-panel, so that we can see, say, the knife he's holding, but not he himself.

When we do get a rare glimpse of him, he doesn't look like the classic version at all. Artist Danijel Zezelj has redesigned him so that he is a long, lanky figure in all-black cowboy garb, with bare arms. He has long stringy hair, and scary cat-like eyes and sharp teeth. He rides a huge white horse, and he seems to be able to turn into various desert animals, or at least we see animals leaving the scenes where he apparently was at one point or another.

The title character's smaller-than-expected role befits his savagery (one victim, who drunkenly boasts about how he plans to lynch the devil by his own pointy red tail, has his gust cut open and is hung from a tree by his own intestines...and set on fire for good measure) and the nature of the story. While this is technically a Western, it's also a horror story, and monsters, like omnipotent villains, don't always make for the best protagonists.

The actual protagonist is Sheriff Moses Stone, who, before settling down as an agent of law and order in the town of Bollas Raton (and as a husband trying to start a family with his beautiful wife), used to be a notorious bounty hunter known as "Holy" Moses. His life is radically upended when the mysterious El Diablo arrives in town. The mysterious figure guns down a saloon full of bad guys, ties Stone up and then carves the name of Stone's home town into the flesh of his back with a knife.

So Stone gathers a posse and rides after El Diablo, headed toward the ironically-named town of Halo. Gradually we learn more and more about Stone and his own shadowy past, and why the devil might be so interested in him. Between El Diablo and Stone, the bodies of characters pile up almost as quickly as they are introduced, and Azzarello manages a few good gut punches by the conclusion, including an extremely satisfying irony.

In addition to a Western and in addition to being a horror story, El Diablo is also something of a mystery, something of a thriller and something of a character tragedy. Azzarello takes full advantage of the license the Vertigo imprint allowed him, and the book is as full of swearing, violence, killing, nudity and sex as one might expect from a post-Deadwood, deconstructionist style genre exercise.

Zezelj, who is here colored by Kevin Somers, isn't an artist I would have immediately thought of as particularly well-suited to a Western milieu, but his mildly-exaggerated figures (mostly around the heads and hands) and heavy reliance on stark blacks prove perfect for the black and white morality of El Diablo, where people are either good, or bad, or worse or a fucking devil. Black patches of ink appear so frequently that the title character, who is mostly just a silhouette with the occasional muzzle flash attached, seems more or less natural in such a visual environment.

I'm fairly certain that this has gone out of print (looks like it's available on Comixology, if that's a thing you do, along with Azzarello's later Vertigo Western Loveless), and anyone interested in the El Diablo character thanks to the derivation of the Nitz version that showed up in the recent Suicide Squad movie probably won't find exactly what they're looking for should they find their way to this. On the other hand, this is a pretty effective story about the diabolical cowboy as a spirit of vengeance, and such stories tend to work best when the agent of vengeance plays a role, but not the starring role.

Azzarello and Zezelj do a strong enough job on the Stone story arc that one could imagine a very similar story being told and having a similar level of impact without El Diablo in it at all. That probably doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement of how well they use the character, but I meant it as such: El Diablo is a remote, unknowable force un-gently prodding and shepherding Stone to the fate he himself chose. That journey is the story they tell here.

Review: El Diablo: The Haunted Horseman

I have recently been reorganizing my massive comics midden, a long overdue task forced upon me by a break-in, during which the would-be burglars dumped all of my long-boxes out in the middle of the room and rifled through the resulting pile, apparently convinced I had hidden $100 bills between random bagged-and-boarded comics (I don't think they stole any comics; I recently discovered that I seem to be missing my entire run of JSA and Justice Society of America, but I'm not sure if the box containing them was stolen in a previous break-in at a previous apartment, where I also lost all of my Robin, Batgirl and Nightwing comics, or if it was just lost in a move).

It's precisely because I have ever-so-gradually been going through every comic book I've ever bought that I know I never finished Jai Nitz, Phil Hester and Ande Parks' 2008 miniseries El Diablo. In fact, I seem to have given up on it after the second issue (Unless I did buy and read all six issues, and the thieves decided to just steal the last four issues of the series).

I became newly curious about that series and that creation upon seeing this year's Suicide Squad film, which prominently featured a version of the Nitz/Hester/Parks iteration of El Diablo in the cast, presumably because the post-Flashpoint "New 52" revival of Suicide Squad did so. I was able to track down a copy of the 2009 collection of the series, El Diablo: The Haunted Horseman, through the library, although it doesn't look like it is currently in print. That is unfortunate (as I imagine others might suddenly be interested in the character thanks to the movie as well), but also understandable (The New 52 version, and the one in the film, vary quite considerably from the one Nitz and company presented in their series).

Rereading the early chapters, I was reminded fairly instantly of two elements of the book I didn't care for.

Nitz picked up on the retconned version of the original El Diablo, a cowboy character created by Robert Kanigher and Gray Morrow, which had reimagined him as being a literally diabolical, supernatural character. In this series, that El Diablo, Lazarus Lane, appears as Rip Van Winkle-looking coma patient kept alive by his curse. At one point he shares his hospital room with the paralyzed prisoner Chato Santana, passing on his curse and making Chato the new El Diablo, "Hell's hitman." What does that entail? Well, he would transform into the guy you see on the cover, with super-strength, a degree of invulnerability and the ability to walk again. He gets a flaming whip and an enchanted pistol from cowboy times that fired brimstone bullets only capable of striking sinners (they would dissolve in the air if fired at the innocent). He also had access to the magic ghost horse that Lane used to ride.

Not a bad suite of supernatural powers, although the face resembling a skull and the flaming whip were pretty reminiscent of the actual skull face and the flaming chains of Marvel's Ghost Rider, as was the mission passed down from a cowboy era spirit of vengeance and El Diablo's specific remit: He was to kill evil men with his supernatural powers, consigning their souls to hell.

The Ghost Rider-iness was particularly strongly felt in 2008, as the Ghost Rider film was released in the previous year.

The other aspect was that grated with me at the time was that El Diablo III here was basically created to do the very same job that The Spectre and Ragman held. How many spirits of vengeance did the DCU need running around killing bad guys? Weren't theyse guys eventually going to get their capes all tangled up at some point? (Looking back, the last Spectre ongoing, the one starring the then-dead Hal Jordan, was cancelled in 2003; by this point, Crispus Allen was the host of the Specre, but, like Ragman, he didn't have his own series.)

Anyway, that was eight years ago. How does it read now?

Remarkably well. I was particularly impressed by the Hester and Parks art, which, were it published by today's DC Comics, would look particularly weird and unusual, as the publisher's range of art styles has gone through a couple rounds of contractions towards a house style and expansion away from that house style, but the contractions have always been more dramatic than the expansions.

In addition to being completely solid on the fundamentals of storytelling–sadly, no longer even a given for books from the two major direct market publishers–Hester and Parks offered thick, chunky figures on a relatively flat plane, in a highly individual style that couldn't really be mistaken for anyone else's. At least I have never seen a piece of Hester's art and thought it was anyone else's, nor have I ever seen anyone else's art and wondered if it might be Hester's (Nor have I ever heard anyone else mistake his work for anyone else's, or anyone else's work for his).

The design of the title character is, in passing, familiar to that of the version in The New 52 and the Suicide Squad film, mainly from the neck up, but not so much in context. Chato is a bald, built, Mexican man living in L.A., and when becoming El Diablo his skin turns ghost white and the markings of a skull appear, while he's clothed in garb that's vaguely cowboy-like (poncho, gloves, boots). The current conception of Chato is a more wiry figure, heavily tattooed (In the film, he's like ten times more heavily tattooed than the rather heavily tattooed Joker and Harley), and he has pyro-kinetic powers, given to him by a vague-ish source.

Chato is a fairly smart and fairly ruthless gangster with a heart if not gold, then at least at least of some valuable metal–he's not a 100% total bastard, but he is a real bastard. This being the DCU, his criminal empire involves more than just the usual, real-life criminal activities and, at the book's opening, he's in the midst of purchasing some high-tech laser guns from the HIVE. When the deal goes bad and the police try to bust it up, Chato's betrayed by his lieutenant and ends up getting shot and paralyzed.

He refuses to give up any information at all to the law, no matter what they do to him or offer him–including an experimental procedure to fix his legs–but his old gang comes for him anyway, and he's only saved by taking on El Diablo's curse.

Once empowered, he goes through a bit of training with Lane in which he learns more about his powers and their limitations, while going after various targets of vengeance assigned to him, and the one he wants, the guy who betrayed him.

Meanwhile, he gets mixed up in a DCU superhero-like plot involving an alliance of several villain agencies that mainly serve as Easter Eggs for long-time fans, gets his first villain in a sword-handed guy named Vorpal and discovers the origins of the curse, which goes back to prehistoric mythology and leads to a climax for the fate of the world (Spoiler: El Diablo saves the world).

Of particular interest is his encounter with "Brave New World"-Era Freedom Fighters, a battle which climaxes in Mexican-American drug dealer Chato Santana literally duking it out with the Spirit of America, arguing over who has more blood on their hands and who better represents the American dream. It's the kind of scene that could only occur in a superhero comic, as no matter how fraught with symbolism or commentary the scene might be, it's also perfectly natural, because Uncle Sam rubs shoulders with the other characters of the DCU. (I was actually pretty surprised by the presence of Invunche, those particularly disturbing monsters from Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, if only because such direct references to events from Swamp Thing would have been a little unusual then; Hester and Parks' versions manage to be creepy without being as completely terrifying as the more detailed version drawn by Rick Veitch).

While I had no interest in the character in 2008, and apparently not many other comics readers did either, based on El Diablo's vertual disappearance until 2011's Suicide Squad, now I can't help but wish this was the version that was still running around. As derivative as many elements of the character are, he's visually much more compelling (and easier to draw; New 52 El Diablo suffers from wandering, ever-changing tattoos) and has a much more interesting back story and status quo than "former gangsters who shoots fire out of his hands."

Also, I really like scary horses in my comic books.

I wonder if this version could have worked in the Suicide Squad, movie or comic book, though, given what we're told of the curse. Like, I'm not sure how Amanda Waller would keep this guy from killing his teammates and everyone else in Belle Reve, like, immediately.

I know Nitz has been given the opportunity to revisit his creation in DC's post-movie Suicide Squad's Most Wanted series. I read a few chapters of the El Diablo story, and I'm afraid they didn't do much of anything for me, mostly because of how poor the art was. I'm interested in re-reading them now though, having just completed this series.