By J. Keith Haney
Azzarello, Brian; Zezelj, Daniel. El Diablo. DC/Vertigo Comics (January 30, 2008); ISBN: 13-978-1401216252
“Dying ain’t much of a way to make a living, boy.” – Clint Eastwood, The Outlaw Josey Wales
The above quotation was referenced by Garth Ennis in his introduction to the Hellblazer collection, “Dangerous Habits” (which much of the later Constantine movie was based upon). He added that the above depends on who does your dying for you…which made me think of this column’s subject, the El Diablo miniseries.
This series is an extension of what was a Vertigo tradition that lasted from the first days of the imprint until the last decade (when DC decided that only original material need apply to Vertigo from now on). El Diablo is one of innumerable Western characters who once were as big a part of the DC Comics output as superheroes. In the traditional canon, he starts out as a banker named ‘Lazarus Lane’, whose bank gets robbed by outlaws. Then he makes the tactically stupid mistake of taking off after them by himself (I’m sorry – no job I’ve ever worked has EVER been worth that amount of effort). He catches up with them, just in time to get struck by lightning (no, seriously). The outlaws leave him where he smolders, but he isn’t dead. Thus, he becomes El Diablo, masked righter of wrongs…pretty hokey, huh? Writer Brian Azzarello, acclaimed co-creator of 100 Bullets, thought so, too, which is why he came up with an entirely different take on the character that is more mysterious, nasty, and even tragic.
The story is told mostly from the perspective of Moses Stone, a small-town sheriff who once made his living as a bounty hunter. Mind you, he wasn’t just any run-of-the-mill bounty hunter. Seven years ago, he was “Holy Moses” Stone, dispenser of biblical justice right out of Lawrence, Kansas. Then, as he tells it, he had one bad case that made him ashamed of himself, made him want to turn over a new leaf. So, he became the sheriff of the small western town of Bollas Raton, married a feisty redhead by the name of ‘Dolly’, and settled into just taking care of his town. But all good things must come to an end. For Stone, that end comes in the form of a gang of outlaws, led by Monkey Joe Cash, blowing into town.
Not that Monkey Joe and his boys are looking for trouble. One of the unspoken agreements between them and Stone is that they keep trouble outside the town limits. They’re just here for a little drinking, whoring…and hiding from a tracker who follows them as close as their own shadows. Later that night, the tracker catches up with them in the saloon and blows them all away with a pair of six-guns. As Monkey Joe flies past Stone, both his eyes shot out, he whispers a name with his dying breath: “El Diablo”. The ghost with the pistols manages to get the drop on Stone and knock him unconscious with a bullet. Stone wakes up to find himself being carved up like an old tree by the ghost, leaving a single word in its wake: “Halo”. We’re later told that’s the town where Stone was born. Before he knows it, Stone is chasing after this phantom with a posse, only to find that he’s walking straight into a trap that he set for himself.
I’ll be honest; in terms of characterization, this is not of one of Azzarrello’s best efforts. In his best work, he can people his stories with a cast of some of the most unusual and unforgettable characters to have ever been conceived. Here, we find too many Old West clichés, pre-and-post-Unforgiven, making their way into the story as characters, interchangeable and utterly forgettable. The one big exception to that is the supporting character of Paw Paw – a half-Apache, half-we-can-only-guess tracker – who is cheerily amoral in the pursuit of his trade. Right or wrong means less to this guy than his getting paid for the privilege of chasing down outlaws, particularly the Apaches on his mother’s side of the genetic equation. He winds up paying a terrible price for that way of life by the story’s end.
However, my above objection does not render El Diablo worthless in any way, shape, or form. It could have been better, yes, but what remains is actually pretty good…and pretty disturbing. The real monster of the piece is revealed to be Stone, himself. As he continues the pursuit of El Diablo, he and the posse run into people who have no business knowing who Stone even is, but do. Some of them actually call him by a different name, entirely. Anybody who does this is killed outright by Stone, no compunction and no remorse. You hear Stone’s rationalisations of the act in his overall narration, but the sheer casual reason for his murders never quite parses with the truth. See, Stone is hiding a secret, the kind that a guilty man kills to keep buried. In a graveyard in Halo, he finds himself undone by another secret that he had no idea he was a part of.
El Diablo himself is never more than a ghost packing a pair of revolvers over the course of this story. He pops in at unexpected moments, occasionally hisses (He never speaks), either kills or gets people killed, and then he vanishes again…sometimes, right in front of you. There are a good many stories floated around the posse campfire about what he actually is in the second chapter of our story, but the actual truth is something that the reader will need figure out for himself. Azzarrello never spells it out, but the clues are all there in the story (much like what murder weapon Joseph Shepherd used to kill the batterer of a friend is right in front of you in the 100 Bullets volume, “Once Upon A Crime”). Suffice it to say, the real story links back to the real history of Moses Stone.
Daniel Zezelj illustrates this story with his usual charcoal-heavy drawings that make me wish that cover artist Tim Sale had been the one who did the interior work. I honestly hate being critical of anyone who happens to get published in as cutthroat an industry as the late-20th Century comic scene. I further understand why the choice of Zezelj as an artist made sense to portray the grittiness of the story. But I have never liked Zezelj’s artwork enough to forgive its murkiness, ill-proportioned characters, said characters’ bad acting, and utter blandness in the area of facial expressions (When a pair of hanged Apaches have more life than your living characters, there’s a problem). This is probably his best work in comics, but considering the competition of his work in Weird War Tales and Gangland, it strikes me as the ultimate in damning with faint praise. The script had enough problems without this man’s artwork to make them worse.
But, if you can get past my objections to both script and art, you will find a story that is definitely worth your time and hard-earned dollars. As good a character study as Azzarello’s contribution to the animated Gotham Knight DVD, “Working Through Pain”, this story takes a giant dump on everything you ever thought that you knew about the Old West.
You can buy El Diablo from Amazon.com.