There are some some heroes out there that don't need to be discussed anymore. Superman's had so many takes on him in all media, that once they finish the new TV show Krypton about life before Baby Kal El got sent on that rocket, you'll be able to watch his whole life from then, on through his youth through Superboy/Smallville, on to him as a grown man on Lois and Clark.
But alternatively there are some heroes you probably don't know about. Heroes that either failed to garner such fame as Superman or, just whern't MEANT to reach that. These obscure heroes, I think, deserve discussion EVEN MORE than the latest Batman Reboot, BECAUSE they are unknown. And that's why I'm making this series: Hero Spotlight.
The year was 1992. Crime was rampant in the US Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, with control of the distribution of drugs as the main source of it. It got so bad, the local government implemented a progam called "La Mano Dura" or "The Hard Hand", doubling down on efforts to subdue the criminal activity through sheer brute force.
But I didn't know all that. I was just a boy, no older than 10. I wasn't into the news. I was into Pop culture stuff, like, I assume most kids where back then. The comics boom was still in full effect, and my parents thought if we preserved random Mighty Mutanimals Comics, one day we'd be rich.
The interest in Superheroes was at an alltime high. With the Batman movies still fresh in memory(and due to be shown on TV at soon.) our local, young TV stations started running any Super Hero content they could get their hands on, such as the then recent Flash TV series and the old(OLD BY THEN) WOnder Woman and Batman TV shows, to Ultraman.
However, far across the sea, one was aware of both of these, seemingly unrelated dynamics. One Nick Innone. Situated in New York, The Neuyorican artist and his wife, (I am bad at names), decided that Puerto Rico needed a local hero. Teaming up with Newspaper EL Nuevo Dia, they began a comic strip series that lasted so and so years. These, are the adventures of Paladin El Cacique.
Paladin el Cacique, or "Paladin The Chieftain".
Ramon Castillo was a well to do man, with a beloved wife, and a sprawling old Hacienda house. Until one day, crime took away his beloved wife. Swearing revenge on all crime, Ramon by serendipity found under his house a sprawling citadel built under his house, built by his Spaniard ancestor who used an unusual armor to fight for the local taino tribes during Spanish Colonial days. Retrofiting this place and this armor with modern supertechnology, he became Paladin The Chieftain.
So basically right from the start this guy's Bat-Punisher. His armor was pretty cool, though, with all sorts of improbable gadgets like helicopter blades and...robotic spy lizards. Does Batman have robotic spy lizards? NO.
It was also a pretty original design. You probably can´t tie this color scheme and helmet design to any other heroes from then, or since.
Running during the Sunday funnies enabled Paladin to have a whole , colored page to itself every Week, and I don't know how the success of a Sunday strip is actually measured, but it lasted years, so I'm guessing it was pretty successful.
Paladin did not for long have to trudge alone through the life of the hero. He was eventually joined by some anciliary characters, which formed a team known as "Los Campeadores Boricuas" or "The Boricua Champions".
A young man called Pepe Ramirez, saw his grandmother badly wounded by the same criminals that killed Castillo's wife. This eventually lead him to seek revenge and finds himself on the Citadel, which leads him to fashion himself a costume, and call himself Gavilan.
In typical sidekick fashion, his first act it to immediately get beat up by a robot and have to be saved. You see, this guy gets it.
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| Puedes volaaaar...leejoooos! |
There was also a mute giant who worked for the local crime lord, until he gave up his life of crime, and became a hero. He was known as Titan, because, well, you know.
But my favorite has got to be Reinita.
A local reinita bird, or Bananaquit , as they're known, found itself captured by an evil witch. The evil witch turned this tiny bird into a flight capable, egg laying human, whom she kept in a cage until she freed herself and moved on to enviromental vandalism, After a bit of a civil case to determine whether a bird transformed into a bird by a witch has human rights(!!!) she became Reinita.
But she had, up to that point, been mostly just naked. So they launched a contest to decide what her costume was going to be. While I was dissapointed that the winner was NOTHING colored like the actual bird, this character immediately became my favorite in the series.
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| To be fair. thick white eyebrows are a hard look to pull... |
There where various arcs throughout, and tonally it was all over the place. For example, the first arc follows Ramon´s attempt to get revenge on his enemy, Number 1. It ends the arc with the Number 1 dead, but also with Paladin having sunk to the bottom of the ocean, dead.
And he was considered dead for two weeks, instory. But suddenly, he shows up, beamed down from a manta ray space ship. It turns out while he was dead as a doornail, Pleasure Goblins from Pleasure Planet revived him and took him to their planet to have crazy adventures. Like, you´re not even gonna ease us into the Pleasure Planet Saga, man? Just like that?
And yes, the little fuckers would show up again to ruin a saga about weapons escalation. A series of events, starting with children accidentally shooting each other snowballs for eight weeks into "weird death cult tries to blow up the island with a nuke." Tries my ass, they do it! While our hero tries his best to disarm the bomb, it blows up in his face, as a splash page describes to us all the beautiful things that where just ended because MAN HATES.
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| Bad End. |
But then the explosion turns into flowers. Surprise, omnipotent aliens at work! And they're like, "Oh, you silly humans. Stop being a violent species, m'kay?"
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| If you can turn nuclear fall out into flowers, why the hell did you need a hero? |
There where shorter arcs, like the witch saga, in which Paladin is mourning his wife in his spiffy new cape, when suddenly, a fucking skeleton witch shows up and starts putting the moves on him and trying to kill him with a rock monster. It took him the entire 4 October issues to rid himself of that random ass witch.
The final arc, possibly unfinished, involves Gavilan being paralized by a bullet(No help came from the Joy Goblins that day. I mean, they where there, but paralisis was beyond them. Yes, turning a nuclear blast into flowers is one thing, but fixing a spine? They're not MAGIC, you know?), and the other sidekicks leaving with him, Paladin going it alone and facing a twisted tinkerer, type, and his own dark duplicate, called something along the lines of Doom.
So the strip was cancelled after this time, and it's heroes faded into obscurity. Or, um, even FURTHER into obscurity. The only way to enjoy their adventures was to either have collected them while they where out(and trust me, that even with my dad's fascination with collecting newspapers, this was not a realistic solution) or to go to the newspaper's actual headquarters to borrow a copy, which again, you'd have to REALLY be into this strip to consider.
You'd think the Internet would have made things immediately easier, but as far back as 7 years only about the first couple of months where made available, only ocassionally alternating to NONE. Thankfully most of them have been made available, some in English and most in Spanish, by the people behind the originals...I'm mostly sure.
The strip is not perfect. The art is a little crude. While a lot of love and care went into any images of Paladin going Hrrraaaargh! human faces would often look a little weird. The whole thing is stylized less like a traditional adventure comic of the time, and more like a mural.The spanish is written by a man who obviously had spanish as a second language, and the Strips would alternate between somewhat morbid and dark subject matter, like crime, grandmothers getting their necks cut, and Satan, with somewhat goofy concepts like little pleasure goblins and lovelorn witches and...robot spy lizards.. This strip might be a bit hard to love.
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| Did I mention I love this design? |
But for me, it's easy to love, because I saw it as a child, and it stood with me. It hits me in that part of a nerd's heart that loves something rare and hard to find. It's something that was a part of my life for years, and even though it must have been part of at least hundreds of other people's lives, it remains a truly rare subject. And as awkward as it may seem, reading them back now, some touches such as the author thanking the hospital that took care of his daughter several times, and celebrating Halloween or one of our beauty queens...It doesn't feel like this was just going through the motions, making a comic strip to make a quick buck. It seems like people pouring their heart into a work of art.
It also may have set , perhaps in a small way, a spark in me, that making superheros wasn't just something people outside of my island could do. To understand at such a young age that doing such a cool thing was possible to me might have guided a lot of directions in my life. I spent years refining my own set of puerto rican heroes, rifining their stories. I knew that if Nick Innone could do it, so could I.
So that's the story of Paladin El Cacique...SO FAR. Could it come back? I'd hope so.
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| Maybe one day...it will. |
This was where the article ended originally. And it wasn't an article, it was a script for a video. But something wonderful has happened. Paladin El Cacique is now going to be available as
annuals through Amazon. I have been contacted through Deviant Art and spent the morning crying like a fucking baby.
For the longest time, It felt like I was the only person in the planet that remembered this guy. If you've read this blog in any capacity you know how I appreciate obscure stuff. Hell, I was contacted through the fanarts I did on Deviantart, the only fanarts of this character that I know to exist on that site and practically any others.
Support it if you can. I don't care if you buy the reprints to fan your belly with them, just buy them and support. We always talk about representation. Here's a Puerto Rican Superhero. Don't just talk.
