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Alcázar, Roberto. Roberto Alcázar was created by the Spanish author Eduardo Vañó (Carlos Ray) and appeared in Roberto Alcázar y Pedrín #1-1219 (1940-1976).

Roberto Alcázar is a well-dressed Spanish journalist (later an Interpol agent) and adventurer. He is courageous, noble-hearted, Catholic, violent (he thinks little of torturing criminals), and outraged by injustice and the abuse of power. When Alcázar goes to Argentina to receive an inheritance, he discovers a stowaway on his ship, a twelve-year-old boy, Pedrín Fernandez. When they arrive in Argentina, their adventures begin. Alcázar and Pedrín fights a variety of foes, from German officers to ghost submarines to vampires to Femmes Fatale of every ethnicity to Lost Race Queens to Yellow Perils (including Fu Manchu (I) himself) to a variety of gorilla assassins, talking gorillas, gorillas with human brains in their heads, and Pimbo, a King Kong (I) lift, on every continent on Earth. Some of Alcázar’s stories verge on the fantastic.

Alcázar appears in stories with titles like “The Living Mummy,” “The Man Without a Face,” “The Pearls of the Maharajah,” and “The Treasure of the Pygmies.”

* I've included Roberto Alcazar in the the Best of the Encyclopedia category because of the ideasplosions within the pulp--just read that list of their opponents again!--and because of the pulp's (folhetin, really) historical significance to Spanish popular literature. Roberto Alcázar y Pedrín ran for thirty-six years, throughout Franco's reign, and managed to make it past the government's censors enough to produce high-quality pulp fun for all that time, during years when the competition was comparatively pretty grim. No small thing, that. 

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