El Mestizo

'El Mestizo' came about from a request by artist Carlos Ezquerra, who wanted to do something different to the Second World War strips he was working on for Battle Picture Weekly. He had worked with writer Alan Hebden for some years, drawing 'Rat Pack' and 'Major Eazy', and it was Hebden who took up the challenge of coming up with a gunslinging hero in a kind of Wild West setting.

Inspired by The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Hebden took the Civil War for his background, against which he needed a character who was not aligned to either side but who had a strong connection with the soul of the country being fought for. Enter the former slave El Mestizo – the half-breed – who had escaped across the southern border but was now drawn back in pursuit of a Mexican murderer named Hutardo he has tracked half-way across Mexico.

Both sides believe El Mestizo could be of use to them and, once Hutardo is captured and taken back to Mexico, the half-breed returns to America, to Alabama where he was once a slave working the cotton fields. He sees a familiar face among the cotton pickers, a girl named Shelley, enslaved to the former overseer, Black Patch. While he is dealing with Patch, the slaves are killed by a Yankee raiding party that has the support of the Union Army's General Collins, who says they have been tasked with disrupting agricultural production in the South, even if it means killing the people they are meant to be helping.

Aware that he cannot fight gangs of raiders on his own, El Mestizo uses the forces of the North and South to his advantage, setting up an ambush with the Confederates to destroy the Yankee raiders and a deal with the Unionists to deal with a renegade army deserters who are stealing from the weak and wounded.

Alan Hebden varied the stories, which generally lasted two or three weeks, so the strip never became dull or predictable. In one story, a Yankee-hating doctor tries to introduce a strain of bubonic plague, which leads El Mestizo to blowing up a ship blockading the port through which the doctor has sailed north and hiring a privateer to chase down the ship he boarded; in another the half-breed carries orders from the President to a rogue General who would rather kill the messenger than follow instructions that he desist from killing innocent civilians.

El Mestizo appeared in Battle Picture Weekly & Valiant between June and September 1977, one of a group of characters that appeared within a matter of months of each other: Johnny Red and Joe Two Beans had appeared in January, and The Sarge and Gaunt both debuted a couple of weeks after El Mestizo. With such a strong line-up it seems something had to give, and El Mestizo stood out from the core of World War 2 adventures that Battle focused on.

Strips celebrating an epic British/Allied victory were clearly more attractive to the young, British audience the comic had; perhaps the very nature of the conflict El Mestizo found himself in worked against the strip's success: Hebden made bad guys of both sides and the hero of the strip was happy to work for either as long as the money was good. Although not the first black character to appear in British comics, he may well have been the first mercenary.

Ezquerra had yet to develop the broken/dotted line that was such a trademark of his work from the 1980s on, but the detailed pen-work meant that while it sat comfortably alongside the works of  Eric Bradbury, Joe Colquhoun and Mike Western it still looked scratchier and dirtier. Looking back, while the Civil War setting and ambiguous hero worked against it at the time, it is the combination of those same elements, along with its memorable artwork, that has made the strip such a favourite in the memories of fans of Battle. New readers will simply revel in the action and energy that Ezquerra brought to the strip and Hebden's array of short stories that went way beyond the original inspiration.

El Mestizo by Alan Hebden & Carlos Ezquerra. Rebellion ISBN 9781781086575, 15 November 2018, 65pp, £14.99 (hardcover). Available via Amazon.