• Reviews

• All
• Music
• DVDs
• Live
• Cinema
• TV
• Books
• Comic Books
• Video Games

Aug 20, 2009 Web Exclusive By Jeremy Nisen

Since DC Comics has a habit of recycling its old characters, concepts, and titles, it might be hard to leave preconceived notions at the door when you dig into El Diablo: The Haunted Horseman, a trade collecting the six-issue miniseries from 2008. After all, the original character, Lazarus Lane, was an Old West-based, Zorro-esque character, that originated in the ‘70s. Then there was a fine, if not especially popular, El Diablo series launched in the late ‘80s, featuring a non-powered mystery man in a small Texas town. In 2001, Brian Azzarello’s El Diablo was a fantastic and creepy western with horror overtones. The latest version owes something to all of these, yet is not precisely like any of them.

Chato Santana, a gang leader, is murdered then resurrected as a spirit of vengeance. Despite the inevitable comparisons to Marvel Comics’ Ghost Rider, El Diablo maintains its own flavor: a mash-up of horror and superheroics informed by Chicano gang culture, crime drama, Native American mythos, and even a little DC Comics history in the form of a mostly spectral Lazarus Lane. Writer Jai Nitz’s pulse-pounding plot zooms along, complemented by fleshed-out characters and a few quiet moments. The scripting only falls short during a fight with a traditional superhero team, Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters. Those DC characters seem out of place in Nitz’s hard-hitting, unsentimental world. And the social commentary from both sides during that fracas should have been left at the soapbox. Uncomfortable story beats aside, superpowered anti-heroics don’t come much better than this. On the art side, Phil Hester and Ande Parks prove to be among the most able storytellers working in comics today, expertly setting the tone and scenes for a book with cross-genre roots and NC-17 sensibilities. (www.dccomics.com)

Author rating: 8/10