Welcome to another feature here at Tales of Unspeakable Taste that I want to try out on you guys. Every once in a while, an awesome comic book comes along, but no one pays much attention to it, and it fades from memory. I want to tell you about a few of them.
The first book to get this treatment is EL DIABLO from the early ‘Nineties. It ran for 16 issues (not counting an appearance in SECRET ORIGINS). And in case you’re wondering, no, it’s not related to the WEIRD WESTERN TALES hero, El Diablo. That’s what I thought at first, which is why I bought the book. In fact, as the story goes, editor Brian Augustyn originally wanted to update the old WWT hero, but get rid of the original gimmicks that made the first character so intriguing. He got writer Gerald Jones and artist Mike Parobeck to tackle this task.
They did the smart thing and eliminated the connection to WWT immediately. This El Diablo would have nothing to do with the paralyzed avenger of the west. This guy would be a costumed crime-fighter (big surprise there) operating out of a shitsplat Texan border town.
Surprise, surprise, Jones and Parobeck managed to throw together an important book that takes on controversial issues.
Meet Rafe Sandoval. He’s a city councilman looking after a particularly bad neighborhood populated with Mexican Americans. He tries his best to take care of his people, but others in city hall view him as the token Mexican, and shit just doesn’t get done. The injustice of it all comes crashing down on Rafe, so he does what any respectable DC character would do: he puts on a costume to fight the crime he can’t handle at his day job. He becomes El Diablo.
Why the devil? An odd name for a hero, right? According to SECRET ORIGINS #45, young Rafael Sandoval heard a story from his father about the old country, where very bad people hung around a very bad cantina. One day, a handsome rich man arrived for a few drinks, and everyone was his friend so they could mooch off of him. Two men decided they wanted all of his money, though, so when he left, they followed him out of town to murder him. The man turned out to be the devil, and he tore the would-be murderers to pieces. The next day, all of the money the devil had spent in the cantina had vanished, and the sum was so considerable that they went out of business. “So you see, Rafael?” asks old Mr. Sandoval. “The Devil, he helps God sometimes, to punish the sinners.”
And things are never simple. EL DIABLO was published in a time when people were starting to question the nature of being a superhero. Long before KICK ASS came along, Jones decided to show what an ordinary guy trying to be a vigilante is really like. El Diablo doesn’t always win. Sometimes, he gets his ass handed to him. He fucks up his quips during fighting. And later, he remembers something he should have said instead that would have been much cooler.
But the most interesting parts of this book are the political moments. When city hall, where Rafe is the only non-white politician, decides to hold a parade for a Mexican holiday, they get all the details wrong. When Rafe tries to correct them, they ignore him because this parade is not about Mexican pride, but about symbolism. Then, despite all of this, they try to get him to be the face of the parade, to remind the people that all of these crusty white people give a shit about them.
And when El Diablo is not hunting down drug dealers, he’s trying to quell the race riot that breaks out because a man is going around the barrio murdering children. The police don’t make much progress, and the people decide that it’s because this killer is merely murdering Mexican children. If he went after a WHITE kid, well . . . .
But the true heart of this book is when El Diablo goes after a coyote who sometimes abandons his immigrants when the law finds him. More often than not, his wards wind up dead. It’s a heartbreaking story, folks. Maybe if some of these Minutemen could read this book, they’d change their mind about how much they hate Mexicans.
The one questionable part of EL DIABLO, though, is the addition of Los Diablos, the group of teenagers who help El Diablo out whenever he needs it. Yeah, it sounds like adding Robin to Batman, which was pretty lame. But here it actually works out because these kids aren’t just gophers. Sometimes, they lose faith in El Diablo. They fight with each other often over what their mission is. And despite all of this, they’re actually pretty effective. Without their help canvassing the neighborhood, they would have never found the child killer, for example. And without them, the race riot would have been ten times worse.
In short, this could have been a very important book in the history of comics. While Rafe Sandoval is far from the first Hispanic hero in the DCU, the topics tackled in his book should have been a hotbed of controversy. In fact, I wonder what would happen if this book had been published now. All in all, not bad for a couple of white guys (Jones and Parobeck, that is). Sure, they fucked up their colloquial Spanish a lot (and one look at the letters column would show you how many readers wrote in to correct them), but they got the heart of the matter right, and that’s really the most important thing.
Why did the book last a mere 16 issues? As usual, it didn’t have enough readers. But those who did peruse its pages every month were very loyal. In fact, EL DIABLO was supposed to have been canceled after the 12th issue, but DC believed in the book so much that they gave Jones and Parobeck a few extra issues to close out the storylines. So, while there could have easily been much more, all loose ends were tied up. It has a satisfying conclusion.
If you can find these issues, you should give 'em a try. It’s worth the hunt to spend some time with Rafe Sandoval, Mayor Tommy, liaison Dixie, and of course, Los Diablos.
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