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Death to Pachuco
Not yet published
Expected 14 Apr 26- GenresComics
168 pages, Paperback
Expected publication April 14, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This review was originally published at my website.
“Now’s not a good time to be a Mexican.” So opens Henry Barajas’s Death to Pachuco, which immediately forces the question, has there ever been a good time to be a Mexican in America?
Although it’s set around the Zoot Suit riots of 1943 Los Angeles, racist attitudes haven’t changed a whit in the 80-plus years. In Pachuco’s opening frames, we’re immediately confronted with a group of US Navy boys accosting a group of Mexican-Americans in a theater. Outside, the police are looking for a murderer. They’ve indiscriminately rounded up hundreds of Mexicans; men, women, children, it didn’t matter so long as their skin was brown. Sound familiar? One doesn’t have to look too far to see similar imagery of militarized white supremacists targeting Others, and occassionally evening killing white Americans because they dared to oppose their hostilities, right here in the good ‘ol U.S. of A. in 2026. Today it’s ICE. In 1943, it was the KKK. Only the acronyms and the masks these fascists wear have changed.
Private Investigator Ricardo Tellez has been hired by one of the families caught up in the cop’s dragnet to help clear the name of a woman being detained as a suspect (alongside hundreds of other Mexicans) in the death of Carlos Urbano.
Despite being, unfortunately, scarily relevant to our present situation, the central mystery at the heart of Pachuco’s noir is disappointingly simplistic. There’s no red herrings and no grandly complex investigation with multiple suspects and moving pieces. The bad guy is fingered early on by the first person Tellez speaks with, and the rest that follows is little more than a manhunt. There’s nothing here to keep you guessing or all that involved aside from the hope that the politics at the heart of the narrative and the riot it’s building towards comes to a climactic head. Barajas tries to shade in some character complications, giving Tellez some rudimentary depth by making him a heroin addict, but even that never really seems to go anywhere or lead to anything momentous.
In comics, ideally, visual art and text work hand-in-hand to tell a compelling story, functioning together in ways that neither can do alone. Dialogue here is a mix of English and Spanish, with the art providing necessary context clues for those who, like me, don’t speak Spanish. Unfortunately, Rachel Merrill’s art isn’t very appealing and lacks the finesse of noir stylists like Steve Epting or Eduardo Risso. David Lapham’s striking covers, used here in the trade collection as chapter markers, are enough to make you wish he’d done the interiors, too, so large is the disconnect in talent between what you want versus what you get.
Merrill provides art duty on the Gil Thorp comic strip, and her work on Pachuco is in a similar style. It may work OK for three or four small panels in a newspaper, but for a whole book it leaves a lot to be desired. She foregoes realism in favor of an almost abstract style. Her cast of characters are approximately human, although they often look more like molded putty than human beings, their features ill-defined and more blob-like and inconsistent. The style strikes me as immature and underdeveloped, which is a shame. Having seen some of the poster art she’s produced, you can’t help but wonder what happened and why there’s such a large disconnect in her work from one medium to another.
The climax lands with a thud, sadly. The actual riot is presented on such a small scale that it’s hard to imagine this being a noteworthy historical event. We should have been treated to a cinematic, widescreen moment of carnage that shows the stakes. Instead, Merrill reduces it to tiny panels of one-on-one violence. There’s no sense of scope to any of it, just individual close-ups, which is disappointing given how well she presented a KKK march through the streets in an earlier chapter. That sense of energy and promise of danger is sorely lacking in the book’s final pages. It only gets more muddled from there. I found myself struggling to identify some of the characters, even as dialogue revealed them to be somebody seen previously. This is as much a scripting issue as an artistic one, given how sparingly the individual in question was used previously and why they were suddenly so prominent in the wrap-up. A few pages later, I found it impossible to distinguish who was getting stabbed during a fight between Tellez and the man he’d been chasing, and had to laugh at how much the killer’s knife changes in appearance from one panel to the next, at times not even looking anything at all like a knife and more like a gray stick or wad of clay. While I don’t care much at all for Merrill’s visual aesthetic, the noir vibe colorist Lee Loughridge brings to the table is strong. I just wish a better draftsman had been enlisted to really make the story shine.
Rather than being simpatico, Merrill’s art functionally hurts the overall story. Barajas’s script could certainly have ironed out a few kinks or gone further in providing additional context to the events depicted. Still, given America’s current political predicaments, stories like Death to Pachuco are absolutely necessary, not only to push back on the now-dominant racist narratives told by those in power and propagated and parroted by mainstream media with little to no repudiation let alone challenging truths, but to educate readers on important historical events they might otherwise be unaware of or lack proper context for. The Zoot Suit Riot is indeed an important flashpoint in American history and our country’s relationship with Mexican immigrants, and it deserves a deeper narrative and a more visually impressive exploration than we get here.
“Now’s not a good time to be a Mexican.” So opens Henry Barajas’s Death to Pachuco, which immediately forces the question, has there ever been a good time to be a Mexican in America?
Although it’s set around the Zoot Suit riots of 1943 Los Angeles, racist attitudes haven’t changed a whit in the 80-plus years. In Pachuco’s opening frames, we’re immediately confronted with a group of US Navy boys accosting a group of Mexican-Americans in a theater. Outside, the police are looking for a murderer. They’ve indiscriminately rounded up hundreds of Mexicans; men, women, children, it didn’t matter so long as their skin was brown. Sound familiar? One doesn’t have to look too far to see similar imagery of militarized white supremacists targeting Others, and occassionally evening killing white Americans because they dared to oppose their hostilities, right here in the good ‘ol U.S. of A. in 2026. Today it’s ICE. In 1943, it was the KKK. Only the acronyms and the masks these fascists wear have changed.
Private Investigator Ricardo Tellez has been hired by one of the families caught up in the cop’s dragnet to help clear the name of a woman being detained as a suspect (alongside hundreds of other Mexicans) in the death of Carlos Urbano.
Despite being, unfortunately, scarily relevant to our present situation, the central mystery at the heart of Pachuco’s noir is disappointingly simplistic. There’s no red herrings and no grandly complex investigation with multiple suspects and moving pieces. The bad guy is fingered early on by the first person Tellez speaks with, and the rest that follows is little more than a manhunt. There’s nothing here to keep you guessing or all that involved aside from the hope that the politics at the heart of the narrative and the riot it’s building towards comes to a climactic head. Barajas tries to shade in some character complications, giving Tellez some rudimentary depth by making him a heroin addict, but even that never really seems to go anywhere or lead to anything momentous.
In comics, ideally, visual art and text work hand-in-hand to tell a compelling story, functioning together in ways that neither can do alone. Dialogue here is a mix of English and Spanish, with the art providing necessary context clues for those who, like me, don’t speak Spanish. Unfortunately, Rachel Merrill’s art isn’t very appealing and lacks the finesse of noir stylists like Steve Epting or Eduardo Risso. David Lapham’s striking covers, used here in the trade collection as chapter markers, are enough to make you wish he’d done the interiors, too, so large is the disconnect in talent between what you want versus what you get.
Merrill provides art duty on the Gil Thorp comic strip, and her work on Pachuco is in a similar style. It may work OK for three or four small panels in a newspaper, but for a whole book it leaves a lot to be desired. She foregoes realism in favor of an almost abstract style. Her cast of characters are approximately human, although they often look more like molded putty than human beings, their features ill-defined and more blob-like and inconsistent. The style strikes me as immature and underdeveloped, which is a shame. Having seen some of the poster art she’s produced, you can’t help but wonder what happened and why there’s such a large disconnect in her work from one medium to another.
The climax lands with a thud, sadly. The actual riot is presented on such a small scale that it’s hard to imagine this being a noteworthy historical event. We should have been treated to a cinematic, widescreen moment of carnage that shows the stakes. Instead, Merrill reduces it to tiny panels of one-on-one violence. There’s no sense of scope to any of it, just individual close-ups, which is disappointing given how well she presented a KKK march through the streets in an earlier chapter. That sense of energy and promise of danger is sorely lacking in the book’s final pages. It only gets more muddled from there. I found myself struggling to identify some of the characters, even as dialogue revealed them to be somebody seen previously. This is as much a scripting issue as an artistic one, given how sparingly the individual in question was used previously and why they were suddenly so prominent in the wrap-up. A few pages later, I found it impossible to distinguish who was getting stabbed during a fight between Tellez and the man he’d been chasing, and had to laugh at how much the killer’s knife changes in appearance from one panel to the next, at times not even looking anything at all like a knife and more like a gray stick or wad of clay. While I don’t care much at all for Merrill’s visual aesthetic, the noir vibe colorist Lee Loughridge brings to the table is strong. I just wish a better draftsman had been enlisted to really make the story shine.
Rather than being simpatico, Merrill’s art functionally hurts the overall story. Barajas’s script could certainly have ironed out a few kinks or gone further in providing additional context to the events depicted. Still, given America’s current political predicaments, stories like Death to Pachuco are absolutely necessary, not only to push back on the now-dominant racist narratives told by those in power and propagated and parroted by mainstream media with little to no repudiation let alone challenging truths, but to educate readers on important historical events they might otherwise be unaware of or lack proper context for. The Zoot Suit Riot is indeed an important flashpoint in American history and our country’s relationship with Mexican immigrants, and it deserves a deeper narrative and a more visually impressive exploration than we get here.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Thank you to Net Galley for the free ebook to read.
"Now's not a good time to be a Mexican." Sometime at the end the author notes that this applies in 2026 just as much as it did in 1940s. This one hit me hard in my SOUL and took me a while to read because it was just heavy.
The lingo lowkey cracked me up because it reminded me of the movie Blood in Blood Out, especially when I saw someone use the word "carnal." I liked that the lingo was mixed up because I feel like nothing was overly used that it got annoying. I also was surprised by how many phrases and words are recently popular that were popular then I know nothing of the lingo of that time period so I'm not sure if guey was really used or it the author mixed in some modern stuff but it was pretty cool. I also loved seeing people basically mention living on stolen land because I genuinely thought that was a more modern concept.
It would really help if you could read Spanish but you don't absolutely have to.
I know nothing of the zoot suit riots and I was excited to read this to learn more but I learned more about it in the stuff afterward than I did from the comic itself. I don't know that I understood what was going on in the comic as much as I should have. After reading the stuff at the back I have a better idea but throughout the comic I was pretty lost. The art style made it difficult to distinguish characters. There may have been too many too because I got lost and I have no idea why the dude was taken care of or by who. It felt like we were going to plan an KKK plotline but then it was just never used. IDK if that was for like authenticity for people in the area or not. I did not like the romance. He bangs one and says the other he's not good enough for. Idk it didn't feel like they actually interacted enough to form a romance.
"Now's not a good time to be a Mexican." Sometime at the end the author notes that this applies in 2026 just as much as it did in 1940s. This one hit me hard in my SOUL and took me a while to read because it was just heavy.
The lingo lowkey cracked me up because it reminded me of the movie Blood in Blood Out, especially when I saw someone use the word "carnal." I liked that the lingo was mixed up because I feel like nothing was overly used that it got annoying. I also was surprised by how many phrases and words are recently popular that were popular then I know nothing of the lingo of that time period so I'm not sure if guey was really used or it the author mixed in some modern stuff but it was pretty cool. I also loved seeing people basically mention living on stolen land because I genuinely thought that was a more modern concept.
It would really help if you could read Spanish but you don't absolutely have to.
I know nothing of the zoot suit riots and I was excited to read this to learn more but I learned more about it in the stuff afterward than I did from the comic itself. I don't know that I understood what was going on in the comic as much as I should have. After reading the stuff at the back I have a better idea but throughout the comic I was pretty lost. The art style made it difficult to distinguish characters. There may have been too many too because I got lost and I have no idea why the dude was taken care of or by who. It felt like we were going to plan an KKK plotline but then it was just never used. IDK if that was for like authenticity for people in the area or not. I did not like the romance. He bangs one and says the other he's not good enough for. Idk it didn't feel like they actually interacted enough to form a romance.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Thanks to Netgalley for the review copy.
This is a retelling of the Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial and the Zoot Suit Riots during 1943 wartime Los Angeles done in Chicano noir.
I love the noir genre, especially when it is done right. This one is 75% right, which means it hits hard in the detective underbelly intersecting with the grit of the night. The 25% miss is mostly with translation decisions. I have an extremely basic grasp of Spanish and had a hard time keeping up with several conversations in the novel. This one could have been easily fixed. Sadly, it left some Spanish words with no asterisk link to an English translation.
This is a retelling of the Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial and the Zoot Suit Riots during 1943 wartime Los Angeles done in Chicano noir.
I love the noir genre, especially when it is done right. This one is 75% right, which means it hits hard in the detective underbelly intersecting with the grit of the night. The 25% miss is mostly with translation decisions. I have an extremely basic grasp of Spanish and had a hard time keeping up with several conversations in the novel. This one could have been easily fixed. Sadly, it left some Spanish words with no asterisk link to an English translation.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
A mystery set in WWII-era Los Angeles during the Zoot Suit riots (1943). The story is interesting but too many detective tropes. (Also the detective is 21?)
The illustrations are distracting and not great and not because it’s stylized.
The illustrations are distracting and not great and not because it’s stylized.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Solid, maybe not spectacular. The art didn’t do much to enhance the story.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews