Awesome / Diabolik

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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• The fact Diabolik is still being published: Diabolik and the whole fumetto nero genre (literally "black comic", the Italian comic books of the noir genre) were heavily attacked by the Moral Guardians and even had to face criminal prosecution, and where Kriminal, Satanik and many others were ultimately forced out of publication Diabolik is still being published after more than fifty years, with the only other survivors being the parodistic Cattivik and the Disney-made Paperinik the Devilish Avenger.
• Every time someone recognize a masked Diabolik without checking the face for masks.
  • Even more awesomeness for Elisabeth Gay. Everyone else recognized Diabolik because he said or did something the character he impersonated was not supposed to say or do. She recognized him by looking around where she expected him to prepare a heist and.taking a good look at anyone who could have been Diabolik. Once recognized him she proceeded to capture him with ease in order to express her displeasure about their break-up.
  • The one who topped them all: Giorgio Corbett, the man who, after analyzing one of Diabolik's masks, invented a device that detected them. Of course, Diabolik killed him at the end of "A Device to Hell", his first and only appearance, but he and his associate Max Foster still managed to capture Diabolik and leave him to the police (they waited for him before a likely target for three months until he showed up, and when he did Foster snuck up on him and knocked him out with a chop on the neck. When he took off his mask, the witnesses immediately called the police), and they would have caught Eva too had Corbett not decided to blackmail her.
    • The Device to Hell showed up again in "Off with the Mask!", when Corbett's nephew Giacomo, after being fooled by Diabolik into helping him for a heist with an identical machine that detected not the mask's ingredients but another chemical element, invented a better one: the original only signaled the masks, the new version indicated the position. Except it was Ginko's trap: upon finding out of the alleged machine, Diabolik moved to destroy it and the blueprints and kill Giacomo, but found the police. Had Giacomo not grabbed the Idiot Ball too, Diabolik would have been captured and executed.
• Every time a normal citizen knowingly goes after Diabolik in a way that could actually work:
  • "On the Morgue's Table" has an insomniac citizen see two fakes, call the police, and, when he sees they're getting away, grab his hunting rifle and gun them down. Sure, it was two fakes, but it was very convincing fakes... And this unnamed man had the balls to go after them.
  • "The Ballad of the King" has two truckers who see a car identified as being driven by Diabolik going on a road that has a mountain on a side and a small cliff on the other, so they jump in their trucks and try to run him over while occupying the whole road. And when Diabolik jumps in the cliff they come down to check the body... And finish him off with a wrench if he's still alive. Ended with them knocked out, as Diabolik got out of the crash unharmed, but props for trying.
• Diabolik's plastic masks, capable of perfectly reproducing human skin. Why? Well, many tried to copy them, but not even the man who taught him chemistry succeeded in making masks that could both reproduce human skin and survive more than a few hours. Diabolik himself had problems for years before discovering the final ingredient that made the masks perfect...
  • And yet there was someone who came this close to actually copy them: professor Garrado, whose masks could be conserved for months as long as they weren't exposed to heat. In fact, Garrado's masks are actually better than those of Diabolik without the final ingredient...
  • Another mask-related awesomeness. The secret ingredient for the masks (unknown even to Eva, who knows all the rest of the formula and how to make the masks from the plastic) was the resin of a tree that grew only in one island, with the obvious weakness of depending on a regular supply of this resin (that in one occasion was almost cut forever). So, the first thing Diabolik did when a chance occasion gave him an advanced chemistry lab for a short time was to try and find a way to identify and produce the active component of the resin, in spite of not having enough time. He still succeeded, and his masks don't depend on regular supplies anymore.
• When Diabolik first arrived in Clerville under Walter Dorian's name he made sure that nobody would recognize him, even killing the director of Dorian's bank and replacing Dorian's fingerprints with his own in the archives of that bank. Yet, Natasha Morgan recognized him as a fake with only a good look, and even guessed how he had fooled the bank (how her henchmen had previously confirmed him as Walter Dorian).
  • Natasha again. In-universe, Diabolik became well known and Shrouded in Myth when a plane sent an SOS and declared Diabolik was about to crash it before effectively crashing, but Ginko and even Diabolik himself had no idea of what happened. It had happened that a few of Diabolik's enemies had succeeded in capturing Natasha after she retired from being a mob boss and were on that plane, but she, disarmed and still half-asleep due them drugging her, played them like fiddles to kill one of them and get a knife, closed herself in the cockpit, forced the pilot to send that call and then crashed the plane. She also got the last word with Diabolik in the process: after allying themselves, Natasha had suggested Diabolik to use the fame he was gaining as a psychological weapon, but he refused... Only to have no choice and do so to great effect after Natasha's final moment.
  • Almost forgot... Those enemies weren't random crooks, they were Lopez, Cen-Fu and Dempur, chosen as members of King's elite because they were some of the greatest and most dangerous criminals in the world, and Diabolik's teachers back on King's Island. And she still manipulated and killed them all...
• The story Mocking Diabolik features Ginko's greatest victory over Diabolik. Ginko had to move twenty ancient golden statues from the place where they had been found, near the depot of Diabolik's confiscated items that was about to be dismissed, to the archeological museum, where they would be kept in a Diabolik-proof room that was being prepared, all of this without Diabolik stealing them. How did he succeed? He first faked the theft of Diabolik's confiscated items, then he used the items to steal the statues and hid them in the basement of the museum as the Diabolik-proof room was completed, and in the meantime, knowing that Diabolik was somehow checking whatever he did, he used hints he had previously planted to make everyone think a mob boss stole Diabolik's items and the statues, sending Diabolik on a wild chase until he publicly unveiled where the statues were. Diabolik and Eva's faces when they found out of Ginko's victory, and then as they listened him telling Altea how he did it, were priceless.
  • The sequel Interrupted Heist continues with Ginko's awesomeness. Due the museum's alarm system and other defenses actually being Diabolik-proof, the King of Terror was forced to not try and steal the statues (it's implied he actually made an attempt, only to see the defenses and run so fast that Ginko didn't even realize it had been him), but when the groundwater under the museum flowed up some of the alarms had to be deactivated to allow for the repair works. So Diabolik made another attempt, penetrated the museum... And discovered that Ginko had moved the statues in secret.
    • Diabolik later found out that the statues had been borrowed by a museum in the neighbouring country of Benglait, and that the statues were already in Benglait, hidden in a farm and guarded by Ginko and a small army of Properly Paranoid cops, enough that Diabolik wouldn't attempt the heist until after the police of Benglait (led by an incompetent chief) would take them in their care. Diabolik still failed the heist due a gang (that included the chief of police) trying the heist and was nearly captured, but managed to fool the police chief (at least until Ginko arrived, took a look around and discovered his ruse). The police chief was later arrested when Ginko discovered evidence against him and passed it to his superiors.
  • Final Mockery, the third part of the trilogy of the golden statues, was Diabolik's turn to get the awesomeness. Diabolik had to steal the statues before they returned to Clerville, where the archeological museum was now repaired and even more invulnerable than before, but Ginko, knowing that Diabolik rarely works with anyone who isn't Eva and wouldn't even try the heist unless he had a chance of stealing everything, had decided to move the statues in three groups, one by plane, one by sea and train and one by armored truck, that would travel in different paths and at the same time. Diabolik still succeeded in stealing all the statues.
• Gustavo Garian, the oldest recurring character in the series (and the first named character to appear, even being the first to mention Diabolik), has one in The Return of Gustavo Garian. How? Knowing that he was terminally ill, Gustavo, with help of other Diabolik victims, hired the best assassins in the world to kill first Diabolik and then himself, and Diabolik barely survived. What's more, Diabolik didn't expect it in the slightest, and was left speechless when, disguised as Ginko, was told everything by Gustavo.
• The story Crumbs for Unknown Persons has three one-shot characters (the titular unknown persons) get one over by virtue of improvisation. Gastone, Filippo and Elietta planned to steal a necklace, but Gastone ended up walking in a trap designed for Diabolik, and, to add insult to injury, the necklace was still in a bank vault. What did they do? While Gastone declared that he had acted alone, his accomplices stumbled on Diabolik going to the bank to steal the necklace, waited for him to complete his heist and for Ginko to curse Diabolik, and then walked in the vault through Diabolik's hole and stole everything they could (Diabolik's crumbs, as they said. The necklace was still more valuable), with Ginko having absolutely no idea of who did it. Then they sold the loot, divided the money in three parts (so Gastone would get his part plus interests as soon as he was released from prison), and opened a luxury restaurant with Filippo's part. Later Diabolik and Eva do find out who did that heist (they were dining in Filippo's restaurant when the newly released Gastone was brought there by Elietta, and they guessed why he was there), and their reaction was to toast at their ingenuity.
  • Being the series' Ensemble Darkhorses, they showed up again in "The Heist of the Year 2,000": after they lost the restaurant and their money due bad luck and crappy financial planning, they embarked on a billionaires' cruise to rob them of all their jewels, Filippo as a cook to drug the selected victims and Gastone and Elietta as passengers to identify which passengers would have the most valuable jewels in their cabins' safes and commit the actual heist, before leaving the ship as a trio.
    But the ship also had an allegedly impenetrable vault with the most valuable jewels, one targeted by both Diabolik and a mysterious gang that had apparently murdered the security chief right before Ginko (who had been tipped off about the gang) arrived to stop them, and, with Eva stuck between the vault's two gates due to Ginko's surveillance, Diabolik was in a hurry to get Ginko out of the way... And suspected them.
    After recovering from the scare of finding themselves in a death trap with Diabolik ready to activate it, Gastone and Elietta explains the King of Terror why they were there, and reveals they had replaced the security chief's keychain with a bugged copy, allowing him to easily track down the murderer (thus discovering it was a lookalike and member of the other gang who had killed and replaced the actual one before the start of the cruise and faked his death because Ginko knew the real one), find out the competitors' plan and hijack it, saving Eva and flooding the vault as a prank for Ginko before leaving.
    Diabolik's away, Ginko's guard is lowered, their victims, depressed for having their jewels stolen by an impenetrable vault, are dining in their cabins... So our Unknown Persons decide to rush things and rob a bunch of billionaires under Ginko's nose.
• The story On the Morgue's Table has some awesomeness for officer Silber and his wife, for sheer ballsness: after a raid on one of Diabolik's refuges produced a paper with the address of another refuge, Silber altered the paper to send the police to guard another home and used the information to take over one of Diabolik's refuges and rob homes using Diabolik's masks, larger-than-life stunts and his wife's help to fake being Diabolik and Eva themselves. Upon finding out, Ginko had to admit they had been very brave, both for the stunts and because Diabolik, upon returning from his vacation, would have been furious.
  • Also, Silber's death gives some awesomeness to an insomniac citizen: upon seeing what appeared to be Diabolik and Eva in action, he first called the police, and then, when it was clear they'd escape before the cops were on them, grabbed a precision rifle and gunned them down. Yes, they weren't the real deal, but this guy had no idea...
• Marina Velar from "The Final Moments". How? Well, upon discovering she had a brain tumor, she decided to get killed by Diabolik, and to do so she baited him in her home, trapped him in behind a bulletproof crystal and started trying to piss him off, before freeing him. She failed in getting killed by Diabolik (and so resorted to have the police mistake her for Diabolik and gun her down), but she still captured him with embarrassing ease... After showing him the capturing device.
  • Also, she previously captured Ginko while in the process of showing him how she intended to protect the jewels she had bought to bait Diabolik.
• Altea's ultimate moment of awesomeness came in "A Killer for Ginko". A mob boss was trying to have Ginko killed, and he was comatose, so to defend him she hired a Professional Killer to take him down. But at their second meeting, in which she would give him the informations he needed to sneak in and do the job, she realized Diabolik had replaced the killer to rob the mob boss. Her reaction? She tricked Diabolik into swearing he'd do the job. Two days later the news announced that Diabolik had robbed the mob boss, killed him in his sleep (with a knife as a signature. He had realized he had been tricked some time before entering the home), and made sure the police would recover the evidence of the boss' crimes.
• The story "Earthquake" opens with one for Diabolik. His chosen victim had a safe Diabolik had no idea where to find or how to open it, and had hired a guy with a gas mask, bulletproof vest and height too short for Diabolik to replace him to check the face of anyone entering, including his wife and himself. And yet, Diabolik managed to rob him of his jewels: disguising himself as an archaeologist he sold him a statue large enough to hide himself inside, then gave him a couple tickets for theatre to make sure he'd open the safe for him (the excuse being he had a sudden business and couldn't go with the archaeologist's fictional wife), and then hid himself in the statue and had himself delivered, ready to wait for the short guy to finish the job for the day and take off the gas mask to flood the place with sleep gas.
• "Crime Knows No Borders" has some awesomeness for an unnamed custom guard of an unidentified Asiatic country, who blackmailed Diabolik into giving up a crapload of money and got away with it. How the hell he did it? Well... The guard worked for Diabolik's personal fence, and, upon learning the fence had died in a car crash and finding himself with a disguised Diabolik about to leave the country with the money he was paid for what he had stolen he calmly told him to give up the money or he'd denounce him for currency smuggling, all the while complaining he was being forced to do it due his shitty pay as a custom guard and the death of the fence who was bribing him, and Diabolik couldn't even get pissed at him.
• Whenever Diabolik fakes his death and fools Ginko:
  • In "Goodbye, My Beloved Partner", Diabolik had been wounded and Eva arrested and put under such surveillance he couldn't break her out. So, after recovering, called his friend Saverio Hardy (a famous writer he had befriended a few years earlier thanks to Eva), told him he was dying due the wounds causing a sepsis and gave him a dying video message to deliver to Eva in jail, and when Ginko found out and had Hardy bring him to Diabolik's hideout (as suggested by Diabolik himself as part of a deal to not get jailed as an abetter) they found it destroyed by an explosion and believed the King of Terror had blown himself up to die on his own terms. And when Eva, per Diabolik's instructions slipped under Ginko's surveillance, cut her veins and was hospitalized, Diabolik was there to make her escape.
  • In "For Diabolik's Head", Diabolik couldn't find a way to penetrate the security of a jewelry exhibition without using the masks, masks that the guards from the private security firm surveilling it were instructed to check for. So, using to his advantage the fact the firm's director was in cahoot with a mob boss and had the latter place a bounty on his head, had people recover a burned and headless body of the right build, and fooled the DNA test to make Ginko believe it was Diabolik's (he had replaced the skin samples from the corpse with his own). After that, he had Eva reinforce the ruse by acting as an inconsolable widow, stealing the body (ostensibly to have at least that. In practice, it prevented Ginko from having other skin samples taken from the body for a new test) and kill the mob boss (to everyone, because he was responsible of Diabolik's head. In practice, because he was trying to be). Poor Ginko could barely believe when a bug he had planted in the security firm revealed him that Diabolik was still alive...
• In an early stort we meet Miller the journalist and his boss Porter, who felt Ginko was an inept using a mediocre criminal like Diabolik to hide his incompetence and wrote it on their newspaper. Diabolik being unable to let them go after such a threat to his status as the King of Terror, he murdered them in two awesome ways: Miller dropped dead in public because Diabolik let him lick his own finger, and Porter died four days later because Diabolik had told him he'd die in five days or less. Now, let's provide the context:
  • 1)knowing that Porter had to replace one of his teeth with a fake one, Diabolik replaced the one for him with one with a cyanide capsule in it;
    2)after that Diabolik waited for the day Miller would read an anti-Ginko speech before thousands of people (including Ginko and his men, who were expecting Diabolik to try and murder him), captured Porter as he was about to go and deliver the script of said speech, told him exactly how he was about to murder Miller and announced Porter would die in five days;
    3)after that Diabolik, knowing that Miller had the habit of licking his finger before turning a page, soaked the script with cyanide, resulting in the journalist dropping dead half-way during a sentence before thousands of witnesses;
    4)after being freed by Ginko, Porter hired the best bodyguards of Clerville and a doctor experienced in poisons and had them start enough controls and check to stop even Diabolik, only for him to suddenly drop dead during the lunch when continuous chewing broke the cyanide capsule.
    For obvious reasons, for years nobody dared to call Ginko an inept or Diabolik a mediocre criminal after this: they were too scared of Diabolik murdering them in another impossible way to even think about it.
  • And this is not the only absurd murder he committed. There's also that time he assassinated a man with a bar of soap (it was filled with chloroform that was vaporized by the heat of the bath, so the poor man fell asleep and drowned in the bath).
• Eva in "The Arrest of Diabolik". Here we have Diabolik arrested and Eva knows where to find most of his loot and many of his gadgets but also has to deal with George Caron, a Stalker with a Crush who is also the secretary to the Minister of Justice and threatens to denounce her for killing her husband (who died in South Africa, but the guy has the influence to give her trouble anyway). You'd expect her to make a runner, and Diabolik expects this too... Instead Eva somehow tells Diabolik to give dispositions to have his body burned without nobody being the wiser, grabs a mask with Diabolik's face and narcotics and mind-altering drugs, bribes the death row guards into letting her see Diabolik (to say him farewell, as she loves him) the night before his execution, drugs and kidnaps Caron, brings him to the shack where she'll meet Diabolik, and when Diabolik is brought there she has the King of Terror condition Caron into obeying any order, so the following day he will be executed with Diabolik's face and Eva and her lover will be free to marry, with Diabolik wearing Caron's face. Had Ginko not been there to make sure Diabolik was beheaded and not noticed that 'Diabolik' was moving funny, it would have worked without a hitch... And she still broke Diabolik out under Ginko's nose and got her stalker killed, as Ginko didn't guess the switch until the very second the executioner released the guillotine's blade.
• In "Hours of Anguish", Diabolik killed a giant octopus with a knife. He was planning to poison it with cyanide, but had to hurry and act before Eva could bring him the poison...
  • In "Inside Diabolik's Hideout", Diabolik had to do it again. It wasn't a trap, Diabolik was swimming underwater and got ambushed by a wild octopus... And, Diabolik being Diabolik, he quickly cut the tentacle holding his left arm and stabbed the beast in the head.
• The flashback sequence of "Eyes of the Panther" is a long one for Eva. It's set in the early stories, when Eva tended to not get involved in the heists unless asked and even then followed Diabolik's instructions to the letter and Diabolik was such a Control Freak he nearly strangled Eva for sparing some people they didn't need anymore and he wanted dead... So, just to prove her independence and put the basis for an equal relationship, Eva set up a formidable heist to steal a painting and, after someone stole it before her and placed it behind defences too hard for her, she manipulated Diabolik himself to neutralize them and steal the painting. In the process she beat up a rapist wannabe and the large bodyguard of her second victim.
  • Diabolik also gets one for realizing how bad he had acted toward Eva and apologize, before Eva could even give him that painting and talk about their relationship. Given he was an hell of a Control Freak and full of pride, it was quite the feat for him...
  • Oh, and that painting? The frame had black pearls inside. They found out only in the present time sequences...
• In the story "Time Jump", Ginko hid a number of jewels in a place only he knew of, and he was immune to truth serums thanks to his Heroic Willpower. What did Diabolik do? He locked him in an asylum saying he was a madman convinced of being Ginko, replaced the chief physician and personally took care of him with Eva (who had simply dyed hair and contacts, as Ginko needed to have someone to check for masks), and told Ginko he was the guy who, twenty years earlier, had accidentally ran over the inspector and convinced himself he was him out of guilt (there were even fake newspapers and cash to further the illusion). Why so? Because Ginko couldn't accept being a fake, and thus broke out and went to check for the hiding place, revealing where it was.
  • And then comes Ginko's turn. Why? Because, as weakened as he was from the effort of breaking out after being underfed, he still foiled Diabolik: the manor of the owner of the jewels was nearby, and Ginko, realizing Diabolik now knew where the jewels were and that he wouldn't succeed in reaching the manor, lit up a fire to call for the bodyguards, and when they arrived he told them about Diabolik. They recovered the jewels and shot Diabolik.
• In the two-parter "A Cursed Island"-"Escape from the Island", Diabolik and Eva fought a MegaCorp that was building a launch base on the island of Bo-Tang against the will of the natives (Eva's intentions were pure. Diabolik, on the other hand, got the secret ingredient of his masks from them, and it had been the lack of the annual package to alert him something was wrong and convinced him to have a 'vacation' in a nearby island). Diabolik, Eva Kant and a small native tribe with little knowledge of modern technology against a large multinational corporation... And, an hell of a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax and the 'accidental' death of the CEO later, the new CEO (who had an agreement with Diabolik, and kept his part) annulled the project and freed the island.
• One-shot character Giorgio Richter or whoever designed his security system gets one for putting together a vault that Diabolik cannot penetrate. How? Well, here's the characteristics:
  • the vault's door and walls are armoured in such a way that Diabolik would take days to penetrate with acids or lasers. Also, being in a house, Diabolik cannot bluff his way into having Richter believe it has already been defeated and abandon it as he did with a similar vault in "The Chain of Ice";
  • the vault's door can be opened only by a password that only Richter knows and needs to be pronounced by his voice. Not a problem for Diabolik, you think... Except that Richter is allergic to truth serums and would die before revealing the password;
  • the vault's one apparent weakness appear to be the air-vent. Except that it's too small for a grown person. Also, Diabolik cannot use it to send in a remote-controlled robot because there's a jammer inside the vault, one that is constantly activated;
  • assuming Diabolik somehow entered, there are weight sensors that would immediately raise the alarm;
  • and assuming that Diabolik somehow entered and deactivated the sensors, there's another safe inside. One too heavy to carry out, whose combination is an unknown four-letters word, number or combination of both, and that goes on full lock-out for one hour at the third wrong combination.
  • With all the above, no wonder Diabolik declared that stealing something from there was impossible... And this makes even more awesome the fact that Gilda, Richter's daughter, successfully stole a diamond from the vault with nobody being the wiser she had done it because she felt abandoned when her father appeared to care more for the diamond than for her. How the hell did she do it?! Easy: being a child, she could enter from the air-vent, and once in she sit on the safe to not trigger the weight sensors and tried multiple combinations, three per hour, concentrating on words that she believed her father would use. And used gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, leading a baffled Ginko to wonder how the hell Diabolik did it and an even more baffled Diabolik wondering how the hell the mysterious thief did do it, only for the King of Terror to metaforically kick himself in the butt when he found out the identity of the thief.
• Ginko has one in "Diabolik Is Innocent". The count Beltran had been framed for his wife's murder (actually a suicide), and his lawyer (actually Eva in disguise, as Diabolik had been arrested while impersonating the count) convinced him to at least inspect the room where the body was found. Ginko solved the case in one minute (plus a couple hours spent waiting for the police's frogmen to find the evidence he had deduced had fallen in the nearby river). And it was a good trick too.
• "Altea's Courage" has one for general Von Waller, Altea's Fox Uncle. Benglait's latest trouble was that the Grey Ravens had (barely) survived their encounter with Diabolik in "Vallenberg's Mysteries" and had rebuilt, and in spite of the recent death of the new leader and the arrest of one of his lieutenants they had no idea on how to stop the other three lieutenants (that the arrested one couldn't have betrayed even if he had wanted to, as he didn't know their identities) from using the organization's treasure (that the arrested one didn't know where it was, as the letter with the location had been sent after his arrest) to start a new terrorist campaign. So, what did the Fox do? Easy: manipulate Diabolik into doing the dirty work for him while he literally enjoyed the show. And it wasn't even that difficult: all he had to do was to plant the rumour of the Grey Raven's treasure, and Diabolik's hate for the organization did the rest in sicking the King of Terror on the terrorists. End result: Diabolik, using what little information the arrested lieutenant could give him after being kidnapped and dosed with Truth Serum, deduced the location of the treasure, stole it and filled the chest with Deadly Gas, just in time for the three surviving lieutenants (as the kidnapped one had been killed as soon as he wasn't useful anymore) to meet each other, gloat on how they would overthrow the government and die as soon as they tried to get the treasure. And the Fox was keeping Diabolik under surveillance, so he literally enjoyed the show.
  • He's always been like that. In his first appearance he managed to, in the order: browbeat Ginko into submission; put together a plan that led to Diabolik's arrest (and had he been in command, Diabolik would have died due an 'accidental' shot from an officer's gun); and, after Eva managed to break Diabolik's out with a plan that involved hiding masks into Ginko's clothes, he verbally kicked Ginko's out of his depression.
• Another for Altea, from "Heroin for Ginko". After a Corrupt Cop from his squad was arrested by him and murdered in jail and he got hospitalized in a scuffle with Diabolik, Ginko was seriously depressed and considering quitting the police. So, what did Altea do to get him out of the depression? She captured Diabolik and Eva. With a Trap Door, of all things. And then the friend who helped her called Ginko and served him the two criminals on a silver platter. Had the woman of the Corrupt Cop not attacked the convoy Ginko was using to move Diabolik and Ginko to jail, the King of Terror would have been executed then and there...
• One-shot character the count Peter Derasè created alarms and other security devices so pervasive and complex they stopped Diabolik twice. And cutting the power wouldn't work, as there was an autonomous generator just in case. Diabolik still stole the crown the count had in his home, but it took him to cause a scare in town (as after the second attempt Ginko had settled there for the third attempt, and he needed him out), flood the basement (to short out the reserve generator) and infiltrate Eva inside (to neutralize the home's occupants and cut the power), and even then he was nearly caught by the final device that, just in case, was completely mechanical and thus didn't need electricity to work.
• In "The Long Night", Diabolik kidnapped a nobleman and his newlywed wife, and locks them in one of his hideouts while he and Eva take their place to steal two crowns. Perfect plan? Nope: The nobleman is too proud to accept this and passes his mindset on his wife, and they proceed to break out of their room and the hideout, steal a bike from Diabolik's garage and go to the police to warn Ginko of the switch.
  • During the escape, Diabolik kills a cop and imitates him on the radio before stealing his bike. The guy at the radio, the brother of the dead cop, realizes the switch and sicks Ginko on him. That time Diabolik got this close to getting caught...
• In "Ferocious Revenge", Ginko found that Diabolik's refuge of the week was protected by a minefield. His counter? Grabbing a submachinegun and shooting a passage in the minefield.
• In "The Fatal Mask", one-shot character Riccardo Koffer and his gang engaged in serial awesomeness:
  • Thanks to Eva's distraction they managed to steal Diabolik's car, and found in it the mask of a jeweller, though this caused the death of member of the gang. Thus Koffer put his dead man back in the car and simulated a car crash to make it appear the mask hadn't been found and used it to ambush Diabolik when he tried to kidnap and replace the jeweller.
  • Koffer's goal: not to ransom or rob Diabolik, things that had got entire gangs exterminated, but to have him organize a huge heist-and then let him go and leave the country.
  • In the meantime, however, Koffer's girlfriend was accused of attempted murder and couldn't prove it was self-defence. Koffer couldn't go and testify about her character to get her free... So he gave his men what they would have got from the heist out of his own pocket and then contacted the police, offering to exchange his girlfriend for Diabolik. And on order of the Minister of Justice, Ginko accepted. Apparently even Diabolik himself considered it awesome, as after Eva managed to free him from Ginko in the nick of time he didn't take his revenge on him...
    • Before the exchange, however, they had to keep Diabolik prisoner. Not only they were paranoid enough to keep him helpless, when Eva tracked them down they forced her to run.
• "The Sin of Gustavo Garian" is a Whole Episode Flashback that shows us something Gustavo pulled in his early days as a reporter: playing Diabolik like a fiddle and getting away with it:
  • It starts when he's investigating on the powerful and well-connected crime boss Marcello Fontaine, and realizes that his secretary has been replaced by Eva Kant (the secretary was left-handed, but Eva did not keep up the change when out of office). In his wish for revenge on Diabolik, he doesn't warn Ginko but organizes a trap for Eva: after finding out where she's hiding, he puts a plushie cat on her road to the 'job' to induce her to go on some caltrops, stopping her car, and then, with the help of a loudspeaker connected to a wireless microphone (a rarity, in the time the story is set), gets the drop on her with a blanket soaked in chloroform. Eva Kant captured;
  • With Eva captured, and making sure she wouldn't recognize him or the place she's imprisoned into, Gustavo calls Diabolik and, masking his voice, demands a huge ransom to lure him in a place where he has placed a bomb;
  • In the meantime, however, Ginko fails to call Gustavo to tell him about the development of his own investigation on Fontaine. Gustavo guesses that something's getting wrong, thus he gets Eva to call Fontaine while impersonating the secretary, and finds out what happened: Fontaine has killed a police mole and captured Ginko and is having him tortured in the attempt to make him reveal where he has hidden his dossier on Fontaine. Dossier that is in Gustavo's hands;
  • Realizing that, had he not kidnapped Eva, Diabolik would have replaced the mole and not gotten Ginko in Fontaine's hands, Gustavo changes his plan: when he calls Diabolik it's not to get him in the mined area, but to change the ransom into saving Ginko, with the addendum Diabolik will promise he won't try and find out who he is or try and get his revenge. For Eva, Diabolik accepts;
  • Diabolik's time for awesomeness. Fontaine's base is called the Fortress, and actually is one. Diabolik waltzes in, kills Fontaine's men, frees Ginko and leaves Fontaine to die a slow and painful death. Then, after Ginko was in the hospital and Eva free, he accepts her suggestion, returns there, robs Fontaine, and burns everything to wipe any trace of his passage.
  • As for Ginko... While he was being tortured, he managed to punch his torturer hard enough to draw blood. There's a reason Diabolik considers him a Worthy Opponent...
• Diabolik had one in "Obscure Revenge". He's sitting on a chair filled with explosive, the daughter of a private cop he killed but he can't remember has the finger on the detonator and if she moves the chair will explode and kill him, he listens her rant at how he made her into a hardened criminal by generating her wish for revenge and how it was right that she killed Eva to make him suffer... And then he calmly stands up, explains that the poor woman can't move due the paralizing contact poison that coated a number of objects he tricked her into touching (cue her realizing she's screwed even before he explains why she can't move), deliver a formidable Breaking Speech centered on how they're both murderers who killed innocents who never did anything to each other but at least he realizes that he himself is responsible for his own acts but she can't admit she's the only one to blame for her own, and then leave after telling her the poison will wear out in minutes causing her to have a little spasm in the process, thus detonating the explosive that, without Diabolik on the chair, will kill her.
• "The Ballad of the King" has a chessboard that can open the way to a treasure if certain statues are put on it in the right order, but the owner, countess Tatiana Milkow, cannot decipher the clue left in the title song. So she cashes a debt that Diabolik owes her... And he and Eva do it in minutes after actually getting their hands on the statues.
• "Challenge to the Police" starts with Ginko reading that a whole congress of criminologists doesn't believe Diabolik is as good as it's said and gets away with his heists only because Ginko is too much of a coward to stop him. Ginko being Ginko, he writes his resignation letter, and as the minister decides if accepting it or not he's replaced by a Renato Evans guy. Diabolik being Diabolik, he decides to prove he's just as good as everyone in Clerville say:
  • Evans implements face checks on everyone entering the central police station and announces it, also declaring that this way he wouldn't risk to give an important job to a disguised Diabolik. Three nights later, using his disguises to enter the truck repair shop near the police central, Diabolik goes under the central, cuts a hole in the floor of the police' archive, and uses the powerful and silent compressor and a tube that he got in the truck he entered the repair shop with to steal the entire archive of the police, before putting in a microphone connected to speakers in the roads and the square nearby. Even Altea and many cops found this funny... And that's before Diabolik mails back the whole archive. After all, he didn't need it.
  • A week later, the foreign dignitary Kinger and his wife arrive in Clerville, and obviously Evans deploys as many officers as he can to foil Diabolik, even replacing with cops all the servants in the castle the government uses for important guests. Everything goes well... Then, right after the farewell party, the cops outside Kinger's room hear muffled noises, barge in-and discover Diabolik and Eva had replaced Kinger right before the party and spent the whole time having fun, even meeting and shaking hands with Evans himself. Turns out there was a secret passage in Kinger's room, as the foreign dignitary explains while trying not to laugh.
    • Some cops say that Diabolik had been lucky with the secret passage. The officers from Ginko's hand-picked team, disbanded by Evans, know he would have found a way anyway, he did it this way because it was funnier and more humiliating to Evans.
  • A couple days later, Diabolik steals the blueprints of Clerville's newest cutting edge combat airplane directly from the designers' table. In a building with face checks and alarms to all windows (including the metal grills-the moment they start receiving a small damage, the alarm goes off) and doors, and jammers to prevent the use of remote-controlled devices. And then, as he doesn't need them, gave them back through a delivery boy... That of course was Diabolik himself in disguise.
    • How did he steal the designs? With a very intelligent trained circus monkey: he stole the monkey, disguised himself as the trainer and trained it appropriatedly, and then, once Ginko was back at his job, gave it back to the trainer.
  • Furious at the repeated humiliations, Evans deploys all available officers to guard all sensible objectives... Just as expected by Diabolik: his real goal was a gold transport that now would be underguarded (and without the defenses Ginko would have considered basic-the escort had gas masks, but the cops on the transport had opened the windows due the heat of the day, and got sprayed with a paralyzing liquid), and Diabolik got the date, the hours and the route by entering the police station disguised as a cop and breaking in the safe while everyone was searching for the microphone in the archive-and guess who told the police there was a microphone broadcasting Evans' humiliation?
  • One for Ginko, for realizing Diabolik's plan and barging on him with the few cops of his old team who weren't on the guard job, foiling the heist. The following day, Evans had resigned in disgrace, and the minister of justice recalls Ginko in service just as he had been expecting he would do the whole time.
• Flavio Todd, the Papa Wolf from "Amnesia", has repeated ones for his single-minded determination to give his late daughter justice and punish her killer, no matter who they are:
  • He first enters the story after a car crash with her, crash that burned her body, not remembering anything from the shock except himself slicing her throat. Having no idea why he'd do that and having been arrested while he was still shocked, he demands cures to be forced to remember, so he can properly pay for his crime.
  • After being sent to house arrest waiting for the trial he finds his daughter's diary mentioning she was going to have an abortion right before the crash, and that finally jogs his memory and makes him remember what happened before the crash: while they were on the car he had seen her taking a pill and, realizing she was hiding something, got her to admit what happened and that she got the abortion from his friend Kruger when she had a potentially deadly allergic reaction from the pill, prescribed to her by Kruger to deal with the aftermath of the abortion without checking for allergies. Seeing that and that she had trouble breathing he immediately gave her a tracheotomy, that is he practiced a light cut on her throat to help her breath, and tried to bring her to the hospital, but in those condition he swerved and crashed. And after a moment of shock he decides to just go after Kruger and murder him.
  • Arriving at Kruger's home he gets the drop on him and knocks him out... Before looking at his face and realizing he took out Diabolik. Seeing a mask with Kruger's face he realizes that the real deal had been captured... And so he poisons Diabolik, calls Eva, and offers to exchange his life for having the pleasure of killing Kruger with his own hands, no matter what Eva will do him after that. She accepts, and after shooting Kruger he reveals what was the poison: just enough alcohol to make Diabolik sleep and give him a bad hangover. It's almost too bad that Eva had already killed Kruger for being a trafficker of organs from newborns and aborted fetuses, so she had to set up everything to make it look he was still alive, and that Ginko, who had discovered Kruger's crimes and thought Todd was an accomplice, arrives soon after...
  • Confronted by Ginko, Todd calmly explains everything, and upon learning what happened with Kruger is only displeased he didn't get to kill him... While he reads documents that prove that Kruger had not prescribed the deadly pill but a safe one. He quickly reasons that the one who switched the pill had been Gloria, his girlfriend who had a bad relationship with his daughter, confronts her and gets her to admit her crime and that she was Kruger's accomplice... And, having realized he was not a murderer, calls Ginko.
• In "The Three Nymphs" the heiress of a formerly impoverished noble family comes to Clerville with her two friends to buy back the family home, and organizes a party to show some amazing jewels found during the renovation works. Diabolik and Eva of course sneaks in in disguise... And that's when everyone but the heiress and her friends is knocked out by sleep gas: turns out they're actually a trio of female scammers whose modus operandi is to walk in a city pretending they're rich, buy a lot of things on credit, and use that to set up the real scam, in this case luring Clerville's richest women where they could steal their jewels. The only reason they didn't steal even Eva's is that her mask was ripped when she fell down, and, not wishing to get on Diabolik's kill list, decided instead to put her and Diabolik away from the other guests and not give them a second drugging...
  • Diabolik eventually tracking them down and stealing all the jewels they had stolen from Clerville's richest... By getting Ginko and Altea to lure them in, the latter pretending one of the jewels stolen from her at the party had been an incredibly valuable family heirloom and making them doubt of each other enough to show up at the fence pretending to be selling it.
• "Ginko Attacks" is the first time Ginko doesn't just wait for Diabolik's evil plan but goes on the offensive, and the King of Terror is for once completely outmatched and on the run:
  • At the start of the story Diabolik targets the Emerald Ballet, an itinerant troupe of dancers that wear real and priceless emerald jewels during the shows, kidnapping the women and forcing them to leave him the jewels. After the misadventure the dancers reach a nearby pub, are approached by a guy who wants to seduce them and can't take no as answer... And all of them pull guns on him before calling Ginko to inform him his plan worked: the dancers were all police women, not so they could jump Diabolik (Ginko knew he'd be ready for that) but because the jewels have trackers into them (all of them, on the off chance Diabolik fails to steal one. It can happen) and he can't ask normal dancers to risk their lives like that. It works better than expected: not only Diabolik and Eva are completely caught by surprise when Ginko and the police blow up the gate to their best hidden refuges and have to escape on foot with only the clothes on their back, by sheer happenstance Eva was wearing one of the bugged jewels when they arrived, and when the jewels' owner informs the police that a bracelet is missing they can still track her and almost foil Diabolik's emergency plan (only dumb luck and Diabolik having managed to disguise himself as one of the intervening cops allow her to escape).
    • The raid's aftermath: not only the police finds one of the hideouts and recovers all the loot and gadgets in it, they also find a paper on which there's written down the location of all the active hideouts (encoded, but Ginko quickly deciphers it) and waste no time raid them all. With a single plan Ginko has recovered almost the entirety of Diabolik's loot (he only missed the part he kept as his personal treasure) and all his technology, a hit Diabolik never recovered from: many of his most elaborate and best hidden hideouts, inherited from Walter Dorian's organization, were discovered that day, and most of the loot was successfully sent back to their legitimate owners or (in case of stuff stolen from criminals) seized by the state, and even many years later Diabolik is still trying to recover parts of it from time to time. The only time Diabolik suffered a similar hit was when he was arrested right after seeing the death of a woman he believed was Eva in disguise, and thus decided to give Ginko a complete victory and told him where to find all his hideouts before being executed.
  • Diabolik eventually manages to recover the money and jewels from one of the hideouts thanks to a cunning plan and one of the cops left to ambush him in a lab being too arrogant for his own good, and hugs Eva to celebrate... And gets shot from behind: Elena Vanel, a policewoman that happened to be friends with the cop he had replaced (and crushing on him), noticed "officer Roller" was acting strange, and decided to hide on the car with the loot on the off-chance Diabolik had managed to make a mask even after they got all his tools and his entire stash of chemicals, and when she realized it was Diabolik she snuck out and opened fire, almost killing Diabolik before being thrown off a cliff. After resting a bit, Diabolik then checks the loot to enjoy his success... And starts cussing at the discovery that Ginko had all banknotes stamped over with "Confiscated to Diabolik" on the off-chance Diabolik somehow managed to steal it back, making it worthless (after all, the state could simply have more money printed to replace it). Diabolik could still rebuild, but had to sell off the few jewels he had managed to recover, and the heist in the following issue lacked most of his usual gadgets, resulting in him being almost killed by his target and later nearly arrested by two random cops that stumbled on him and opened fire, before being almost captured by Ginko (the two cops having called Ginko the moment Diabolik dodged the first bullets, as they knew they had lost their chance but Ginko and his team could still succeed).
    • One for officer Roller: he's too arrogant for his own good and rather than ambushing Diabolik from behind as instructed tried to shoot him, allowing him to react and disarm him, but he's brave enough that upon losing his gun he charges at Diabolik and almost overpowers him.
  • The movie adaptation added a couple more bits for the police:
    • In the prologue, Diabolik steals an emerald-encrusted diadem that is part of a collection. Ginko sets the Emerald Ballet up with the rest of it because he knows Diabolik would never resist the temptation to steal the rest.
    • In the comic the police finds out Eva is wearing one of the emerald jewels when the owner goes to the police to point that out, but in the film it's Elena Vanel to notice while she was cataloguing the recovered jewels from Diabolik's first hideout, giving her another moment of almost foiling Diabolik's plan.
• "A Bullet for Diabolik" starts with Diabolik stealing a large amount of gold but being shot in the process, having underestimated the owner Eugenio Bauer (or rather the paranoia of Bauer's wife, that feared the cops that intervened for a false alarm were fakes and had him call the police, though she didn't expect Diabolik and Eva Kant)... Then Ginko raids his hideout and the one he escapes to (interrupting Diabolik and Eva right when they were starting to make out): Bauer shot Diabolik with a tracking bullet and gave the tracker to the police. The only reason Diabolik managed to lose only two hideouts and the loot inside them was that Eva had extracted the bullet right before the second raid started, meaning that Ginko couldn't follow them to the next one.