This chapter focuses on a specific comics genre, crime fiction, and the multiple relationships between the two spheres of comics and graphic novels. It takes as its starting point the Crime Does Not Pay magazine (1942), while also presenting a detailed overview and critical analysis of the history of crime comics, which in the beginning often purported to be based on true crime stories. The chapter further analyzes the policy of EC Comics, which entered the crime fiction trend in 1948 before transitioning to horror and science fiction. The chapter then examines the appearance of a new orientation within the EC stories, aiming at effecting progressive social change, in sharp contrast to the severe criticism voiced by psychologist Fredric Wertham, whose anti-comics crusade resulted in the Comics Code (1954). After its implementation, crime fiction disappeared from mainstream comics, but reappeared in the independent comics boom, where creators continued to mine the subversive potential of the genre for political commentary. A close reading of Ed Brubaker’s oeuvre illustrates the new forms of the crime comics tradition today.

The day after the massacre, the judicial authorities in charge canvas Dongo’s neighbors, seeking information about any strange sounds or other unusual events that they observed the day before. Although Dongo paid a hefty sum to rent his spacious home and warehouse, he shared the neighborhood with a diverse group of small businessmen and their families. Some rent rooms, and others maintain large households in two-story buildings. The local residents have a good reputation. All are known as honorable men, however humble. Some of these witnesses were lucky to have one last quiet night before awakening to the shocking massacre which took place just steps away from their doorways. But others experience strange sightings and sounds which disrupt their rest and foreshadow the terrible discovery made the following morning of October 24.

All three of the prime suspects in the Dongo investigation have previous experience with serious accusations. They show their understanding of the justice system with different levels of sophistication and with their aggressive or evasive responses to Emparan’s questions. Finally, faced with bloodstains on each of their belongings and the pressure of face-to-face confrontations, Quintero, Blanco, and Aldama can no longer avoid the truth. They admit that they all killed on the night of October 23, 1789, but not before Emparan’s court collects more evidence and the judge calls them in for several sessions of questioning.

Who wrote and circulated the first detailed account of the investigation? Depending entirely on this mysterious text, from the 1830s to the 1890s, Mexico’s most influential writers, thinkers, and political commentators retold the story of the deaths of Dongo and his servants, Emparan’s investigations, and the rapid resolution of the crime. These nineteenth-century retellings appeared in various kinds of publications, from periodicals to multi-volume novels. Each of these versions had its own interpretative angle, but all of the nineteenth-century authors contextualized the massacre as an important symbol of the legacy of the Spanish empire. The case also provided Mexican intellectuals with a starting point for discussions about morality and free will, the continuing influence of the Catholic Church, and, above all, the effective Novohispanic judiciary in sharp contrast to the shortcomings of law enforcement in their new nation. This text provided fuel for political critique and its insider legal perspective strengthened the points of anyone who deployed it to argue their own views about the independent nation of nineteenth-century Mexico.

This introduction frames the crime at the heart of the book with vignettes of historical and textual background, adding a few additional fragments to the kaleidoscope of murder and its aftermath in late-eighteenth-century Mexico City. It proposes the 1789 murders, which are the topic of this book, as early examples of Mexican True Crime. The introduction also includes select critiques regarding this genre and other comments on the different genres of literature depicting murder in Mexico. This book recreates a paper trail of Enlightenment-era greed and savagery which began with a brutal massacre. The events which took place on the night of October 23, 1789, led to politicized depictions in different fiction and nonfiction writings for the next century.

For many writers, one singular clue symbolizes the Dongo massacre and its rapid resolution by the Novohispanic judiciary. Written accounts obsess over one tiny bloodstain which plays a critical role in the events that took place from October 23 to November 7. This chapter continues to discuss the investigations of the murderers, including an array of different clues, not just the famous single drop of blood.

Within a span of less than five years, Mexican presses published two historical novels based on the Dongo massacre and its rapid resolution by the viceregal judiciary. The first of these was José de Cuéllar’s 1869 El Pecado del Siglo: Novela Histórica, Época de Revillagigedo, published by the Tipográfica del Colegio Polimático in San Luis Potosí. Only four years later, the first volume of a book called Los Asesinos de Dongo: Novela Histórica appeared in Mexico City, written by Manuel Filomeno Rodríguez. In 1876, the same publisher, Barbedillo and Company, published volume two of Los Asesinos de Dongo. Both authors chose to write these historical novels to take part in an important nationalist and didactic literary trend in Mexico’s Restored Republic. Influenced by the politician, intellectual, journalist and writer Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, novelists like Rodríguez and Cuéllar felt inspired to help Mexicans understand their own history through fictional characters.

This chapter depicts the witnesses who heard sounds or picked up clues before, during and after the massacre on the night of October 23, 1789. It brings to life the moment when the crime was discovered and the initial reports of the investigating judicial officials, as well as surgeons who examined the bodies.

This conclusion ranges across time, but focuses on the theme of death as carried out as a state-sanctioned public spectacle in one space – the Sacred Precinct/Plaza Mayor/Zócalo of Mexico City. The association between Mexico and death grows steadily with images seen in popular culture and the ever-increasing interest in the Day of the Dead – to the point that Posada-style calavera makeup has become a tired cliché like so many other Halloween costumes. This book has attempted to analyze death in Mexico to juxtapose criminalized murders with ceremonial killing rituals.