This weekend’s light-hearted, escapist superhero post from Balladeer’s Blog looks at one of Warren Publishing’s most neglected 1970s characters from Eerie magazine – the disfigured, gun-wielding vigilante priest called the Butcher.
EERIE #62 (Jan 1975)
Title: Forgive Us Our Trespasses
Hero: The Butcher
Villains: The New Orleans Mafia
NOTE: Along with Eerie‘s recurring characters the Spook (a big, black zombie in the 1840s American South who slaughters slave owners, evil Voodoo practitioners and their zombie armies) and Coffin (an undead and disfigured gunslinger in the late 1800s West who suffers under an Indian curse), I consider the Butcher to have tragically wasted potential.
Written by Bill DuBay and drawn by iconic artist Richard Corben, the Butcher combined Marvel’s the Punisher with its horror characters and paperback novel antiheroes like the Executioner and the Destroyer.
Synopsis: In June of 1932, New Orleans Mafia Don Carlo Gambino (no relation to the real-life New York Mafia boss of the same name) is on his deathbed. He has an unnamed priest brought to him to hear his last Confession.
Carlo’s oldest son Charlie fears that his father may implicate him in his Confession, so he sends some button men to blow away the elderly man but make it look like the rival New Orleans Mafia family the Pontis were behind it.
The killers eliminate Carlo, but the priest catches some buckshot himself, disfiguring his face and prompting the Hit Men to think he’s as dead as Carlo. They flee the scene and the priest drags himself into hiding.
Our hero lies in wait and when his health returns, he gets into shape, dons a coat, hat and scarf and becomes the Butcher.
By now a full-blown Gang War is plaguing New Orleans with many innocent people dying as collateral damage to the uncaring Mafia families’ conflict. Shotgun and knife in hand, the Butcher stalks the nighttime streets, first killing his attackers – one of them while he’s confessing at Corpus Christi Church – and then waging war on the gunmen from the feuding gangland organizations.
EERIE #64 (Mar 1975)
Title: Bye-Bye, Miss American Dream
Synopsis: The Mafia War in 1932 New Orleans has been going on for 4 months with breathless headlines covering all the bloodshed, including that caused by the mysterious antihero called the Butcher as he preys on both warring factions.
Our tormented antihero has been tagged as the missing and previously presumed dead priest (still unnamed). He is constantly on the run from the cops AND the warring Mafiosi as they fight over New Orleans gambling, prostitution and bootlegging.
The Butcher comes and goes at will despite his fugitive status. Like Judex or the Shadow he knows every step his enemies take and as the gang war goes on, our main character realizes that Charlie Gambino is being outmaneuvered by his youngest brother Harry.
With the Butcher adding his own kills here and there the war continues into October, when Charlie sets up a Sit-Down between the Gambino and Ponti families to join forces against the vigilante priest. Harry uses the meeting to knock off Charlie and his other brother as well as the Ponti Family heads and capos.
Harry has become the most powerful gangster in New Orleans, inheriting the Gambino Family and absorbing the defeated Ponti Family. The Butcher manages to ambush him in his own mansion, shows him his disfigured face, then blows him away with his shotgun.
Exorcising the last of his insane hunger for revenge, the Butcher uses his knife to disfigure Harry’s face.
With a rush of regret, he realizes he has failed God and is no better than those he fought. He pins a lengthy letter to Harry Gambino’s corpse explaining all his actions and slips away to ponder his sins in seclusion somewhere.
The cops who read his note respect him and decide to let the public think that the Butcher died with all the other major players in the day’s final paroxysms of slaughter that brought the war to an end.
*** Sadly, Eerie never used the Butcher character again. They could have done a story or two set during the 4-month long Mafia War if they didn’t want to do an outright sequel. And let’s face it, a 1970s Grindhouse movie adaptation of the Butcher’s saga could have become a cult hit.
None of that was to be, however. We never even got to learn the priest’s name!
Balladeer's Blog 