El Valiente #1

Posted: Tuesday, October 23, 2007
By: Steve Saville

Writer(s): Ray Ramos
Artist(s): Elmer Pasaoa
Publishers: Adversary Comix.
Address: 9402 233 Aspen, El Paso, Texas, USA.
Price: US $2.99

Action packed with a capital A.

‘El Valiente’ is a mix of corny Pulp action and Mexploitation as the muscle bound main character, a masked Mexican luchador takes on Ninja robots, mad professors, Count Dracula and anyone else thrown at him.

And as he wades through a solid mass of baddies we ask ourselves why he is bothering. The answer my friend is visually obvious, to save the scantily clad twins with enormous breasts who are never far from his side. These two give a whole new meaning to the term ‘well endowed.’ When they are not screaming with fear they are busy popping out of their too, too small bikinis.

What we have then is a real salsa mix of Jack Black’s movie character, action bursting from every page, conventional comic and characters and big boobs. What more could you want?

As you would have realised by now this is not an intellectual comic, it is an action one and so extended fight sequences tend to dominate the 23 pages. It is all good fun though. The bold colourful cover attracts attention and the opening page certainly establishes the tone. There is El Valiente shackled next to the twins [equally shackled] while the evil Professor Terror prepares to zap them with a deadly and ‘over large’ ray gun.

We are presented here with two stand alone tales separated by a very amusing pseudo advertisement. Personally I enjoyed the initial story more. The art work was bolder and felt less cluttered and anyway El Valiente is wearing a stupid sweater in the second tale.

The skilful marrying of clichéd Mexican phraseology with English in the narrative works brilliantly, it creates a real south of the border atmosphere that adds to the overall authentic feel of the comic.

The main problem that I have is that as the main character is masked throughout it is hard to identify with him. After all Batman is also the unmasked Bruce Wayne and this helps us, as readers, to get to know him. In the same way the heavy reliance on action tends to overshadow characterisation in this initial edition. None of which is a problem if this is a ‘one off’ but if this is the first part of an ongoing series [and I certainly hope that it is] then some care will need to be taken over adding a personality to the brawn.

There is a real witty tongue in cheek feeling about this comic, it feels like it was fun to create and it certainly is fun [though not by any means deep] to read.

In a Word: Arriba.

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