Dax the Damned - Bilious with Death
Sword & sorcery Warren-style: Demons, devils, damnation & desire!
Eerie #59: Dax the Damned (Warren – 1974) – May 2026
Covers: Ken Kelley & Sanjulian
Story & Art: Esteban Maroto
Writer: Translated from the Spanish by Budd Lewis
I had been wanting this particular issue for years as I was always intrigued by Dax. The artwork is stunning. Maroto’s work is ornate and stylish with a sense of elegance and poise, but it’s also gothic and macabre like Goya. It is compulsive and compelling, making it impossible to avert your gaze, no matter what terrors unfold.
Damn your soul
And beneath the horror, lulling your senses and luring you to your doom ares Maroto’s sensuous, sultry, seductive femmes, who ooooooze sex appeal and animal magnetism out of every pore. Maroto was a master at depicting the kind of women who makes your blood boil and pound in your veins boil, and makes you want to damn your soul with desire. Or that could just be me…
Iron-fisted regime
I find it hard to believe that Maroto was drawing this kind of raunchy material in the devoutly Catholic and repressive era of Franco. I’m not completely sure, but I think Dax and a lot of Maroto’s early work at Warren had previously been published in Spain. Perhaps comics were beneath the attention of Franco’s censors, or perhaps as it was towards the end of El Generalissimo’s iron-fisted reign and things were loosening up in a bid to attract foreign valuta.
Infernal damnation
Regardless of the political circumstances under which this work was produced, Maroto provides a phantasmagorical tour-de-force of pulse-pounding images that run the gamut from the macabre to the horrific and the seductive. Like all good horror, Maroto’s work slyly, seductively insinuates it into the readers’ mind, urging them to pluck the eyes from their reason and blindly descend into the steaming bowels of their own infernal damnation.
Ape-snot
The writing, however, is less satisfying as writer Budd Lewis rewrites Maroto’s original Spanish prose in a bid to make the stories more assessable. He doesn’t really succeed in my opinion and the stories are largely opaque and obtuse. Dax doesn’t really have a personality, and the strip doesn’t seem to have any kind of continuity or cohesion, like for instance, Conan. The stories are all isolated incidents that feature an anonymous hero in various horror scenarios. It’s as if the stories merely present a canvas for Maroto to go ape-snot on.
A frenetic nightmare
Lewis’s overly-verbose and pseudo-poetic verbiage doesn’t necessarily make things clearer. It’s more like it provides a motif or soundtrack to Maroto’s visuals that enhances the mystifying mood and sense of visceral horror. The stories all have a stream-of-consciousness randomness to them, like a frenetic nightmare, disjointed but compelling. They seem to run together like mercury, sweeping the readers along in a flood of florid imagery and primeval emotions.
Hey, don’t blame me if I don’t make any sense, neither does Dax and neither does anything else…
Your poison of choice
If you crave straight-forward, linear storytelling in which everything is black and white like in most American comics, this is not for you. If, however, you are looking to abandon your preconceptions (and all hope) and immerse yourself in a world of dark fantasy and evocative imagery, this might just be your poison of choice.
Bilious with death
My favourite tale, in as much as I can distinguish one from the other is “The Witch..The Maneater”, which contains these immortal lines of prose:
‘You maggot sucker! Gird yourself and hie thee hence!’
(I may be mistaken, but I don’t think you can ‘hie thee hence.’
‘Come chew the arm of Dax the demon slayer, you maggot pukes!’)
‘Gods damn your reeking bowels, witch! I’m going to pull them out your rectum through your mouth!’
(OUCH!)
‘I am bilious…suddenly filled with death!’
I don’t know how you can be bilious with death, but whole cares!
They just don’t write ‘em like that anymore!
