Last Issue Special # 11: El Diablo

SERIES: El Diablo

DATE: 1991

THOSE RESPONSIBLE: Gerard Jones (writer), Brian Augustyn (editor)

CATEGORY: ACCEPTANCE

In a lengthy column on the letters page, writer Gerard Jones explains what he was hoping to accomplish with El Diablo:

"A while back we set out to create a comic book that would cast a new--and more humane--light on the icon of the costumed vigilante. We wanted to create a fictional city that functioned as a believable human community, and not just one of those metaphorical 'urban hells' that usually pass for cities in comic books. We tried to bring in some of the cultural and social realities of America in the present, without relying on any easy, didactic 'topicality.'"

Although the series only lasted sixteen issues, most of these ends were accomplished: El Diablo really is as much or more about the fictional southwest town of Dos Rios as it is about costumed adventuring. Politics and racial tensions between Whites and Hispanics are a major theme in the story, and are handled in a thoughtful and interesting way. The series wraps up nicely as the man behind El Diablo decides he can accomplish more as a city councilman than as a costumed vigilante. Jones writes that DC was quite supportive of the series and offered him an additional four issues in which to wrap things up after cancellation became apparent.

"[S]o what's it all add up to? Not an awful lot. We've left the comic book mainstream just about exactly where we found it over a year ago. Lots of obsessed, twisted crimefighters haunting the streets of urban hells that seem born of particularly timid middle-class nightmares. But I'm glad we had a chance to sound a somewhat different note for a least a little while. I'm glad we were able to present . . . the idea that social action is the truest kind of heroism . . . That America's cities, for all their troubles, are the laboratories of global society, and that the human community might still be able to heal and improve itself."