DIABLO

Welcome once again dear fiends to the Tomb of the Trumps! Yes, it's time to draw another card from the infamous 1980s' Horror Top Trumps game and discover where they were ripped off from... I mean, what they were inspired by... Anyhow, without further a-do, let's get the ball rolling with a very devilishly tricky customer!

And no, that wasn't just an ideal pun, for I mus confess that this one has very nearly beaten me! While there is something familiar about this demonic character, so far I've been unable to find a satisfactory match for him. Now the received wisdom on the matter is that this here Diablo character is actually a very loose drawing of the titular fiend from the classic Night of the Demon (or Curse of the Demon if you are in the US of A), the horrible fire demon summoned by a runic charm as seen here -

However I'm not entirely convinced about this claim. For our unknown artist usually copied his sources far more faithfully, and hence, despite similar nostrils and pose, these two devils are just a bit too different for me to buy the Night of the Demon theory. Furthermore, knowing how much our mysterious artist did copy, the style Diablo is rendered in suggests to me an alternative source, namely 1970s comics. Now as we saw in with Devil Priest, horror comics did influence other cards, and that scratchy, sketchy shading on Diablo reminds me very much of the black white art in horror titles of that era. But despite hunting to high Heaven and low Hell, it does't look like Diablo is one of the recurring demon characters in '70s horror, and I'm not been able to find a matching one-off devil or demon yet either... So then, unless you know better, the hunt for the real Diablo continues...