The Demon Within: Sensationalism, crime, and morality in the comics of Mexican serial killer Goyo Cárdenas, the Tacuba Strangler

Drawing on history, literary criticism, and media theory, this paper addresses the comics of Mexican serial killer Goyo Cárdenas, the Tacuba Strangler. I argue that post-revolutionary Mexico’s sensational literature, particularly the Nota Roja and true crime comics set the context for the creation of Goyo Cárdenas popular legend. Based on the analysis of his comics, autobiographical books, and interviews with cartoonists, I argue that the comics’ criminal sensationalism allowed Cárdenas to construct a public moral façade, while at the same time the comics’ plots and format enabled him to project his murderous fantasies in a sanitised fashion. I conceptualise this process as the construction of an externalised morality around a set of detached lustful homicidal fantasies, which permitted Cárdenas to recreate himself as a reformed individual before public opinion in post-revolutionary Mexico’s pathological public sphere, within which Goyo’s stories contributed to the reproduction of a criminal literacy among Mexican popular classes.