As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
- Diabolik himself, especially in the early stories: he is a thief and a murderer, with absolutely no qualms about killing anyone who gets in his way, the intelligence to do so in improbable and almost impossible ways, and can take almost anyone's face. Meaning your new neighbour could be Diabolik, and if he thinks you have found out he'll plant a knife in your back. They call him King of Terror for a reason, you know...
- Case in point, his past lover Elisabeth Gay and his true love Eva Kant: Elisabeth was nearly Driven to Madness by finding out she was living with Diabolik (who had been nothing but gentle with her), and after the one time Diabolik almost killed her for defying him, Eva had actual nightmares for weeks.
- Another example: in the story "Gruesome Ballad", a man had a heart attack when the man he was speaking to revealed himself to be Diabolik. That is how nightmarish Diabolik is.
- In "Abandonment", Diabolik helped a convict to escape from a train during a transfer, brought him to his car, took off the mask... And then had to stop the convict from going back to the police, as the man just knew Diabolik would kill him. Turned out Diabolik didn't want to harm him, but the reaction is quite telling.
- In "Challenge to the Police", Ginko had resigned in protest at a criminology congress indirectly calling him a coward by declaring a brave cop would have already stopped Diabolik. In response, Diabolik steals the main archive from the police central (Ginko's replacement had stated specifically he'd made sure Diabolik couldn't enter the police central), replaces a foreign diplomat under the police' nose, and steals the blueprints of Clerville's new state-of-the-art warplane, all of this to prove he could-and, most importantly, as a distraction, as he needed to provoke Ginko's replacement into deploying all available cops away from a gold transport Diabolik wanted to steal. And while Diabolik's humiliation of Ginko's replacement is Played for Laughs, the fact he succeeded (and that one of Ginko's handpicked cops knew Diabolik used a secret passage to replace the diplomat because it was funnier that way) is quite terrifying.
- On one occasion, a terrorist being held at knifepoint by Diabolik admitted he wouldn't dare to go against Diabolik. This guy was in Clerville to raise fund for a coup in another country, but going against Diabolik was something he wouldn't dare.
- The reason the terrorist had found himself with Diabolik holding him at knifepoint: knowing he had a fortune in diamonds, Diabolik wanted to rob him and had Eva replace his housekeeper to interrogate him with truth serum, but Clerville's intelligence, spotting the kidnapping, replaced Eva with one of theirs to murder him... And when the agent was shot by his bodyguards without being unmasked, Diabolik thought they had killed Eva, poisoned one of the bodyguards, and used his death to convince the others he had poisoned them all and he had put a single dose of antidote nearby, leading to the chief bodyguard to shoot the others, walk to the antidote, and find out it was actually a painful-acting poison the worst possible way. Then Diabolik walked in to kill the main guy.
- In the same occasion, what Clerville's intelligence agent Nina River did: upon being informed by her men that Diabolik thought Eva was dead she just decided to wait and clean up after Diabolik, as she knew he'd kill them all without much fuss while she couldn't figure how to do so; and after being ordered to hand Eva to the police she instead staged her break out and let her go, as she didn't want Diabolik to come after her-and said so to Eva through a recorded message, with the fact Diabolik now owed her a favor (that she actually cashed in when some of her superiors set her up for a failure) being nothing but a side benefit.
- Diabolik is not the worst criminal in his world. Sleep well.
- Diabolik being tried and sentenced to death in "The Arrest of Diabolik" has a few consequences:
- Aside for Ginko and his team, every single cop in Clerville treats it as an order to kill Diabolik on sight. It's implied every court in Clerville would pass it off as self-defense, and only Ginko's sheer honesty keeps him and his men trying to take Diabolik alive.
- Even then, Ginko and his men know exactly how dangerous Diabolik is... So their attempts to take him alive consist in a single intimation to surrender and then shoot to kill if he tries to do anything else.
- Fabio Von Waller, Altea's uncle, once flat-out said that if he was the cop in charge of arresting Diabolik he'd have him shot after he surrenders and is cuffed and either pass it off as an accident or Diabolik trying to resist, because Diabolik is just that dangerous.
- Diabolik knows perfectly that he lives on borrowed time, and every time he's arrested he normally has about one day to try and escape: between the death sentence and the sheer danger he poses, the Minister of Justice will prepare and sign the death warrant the moment Ginko informs him of the success, at which point it's just a matter of preparing the guillotine... Assuming Ginko hasn't prepared a trap he's sure will work, because in this case he'll have everything prepared early, lacking only the signature on the death warrant, to execute Diabolik the moment he's delivered to the jail. The only exceptions are when Diabolik is wounded enough to not walk, as the law mandates he walks to the guillotine (or is at least able to do so) and the executioner will have to wait for him to heal enough, and the time Eva was thought to be dead, as Ginko knew he was too broken to try anything and capitalized on it to get him to reveal where his hideouts were (and the identity of the criminals that apparently killed Eva).
- The story "Stop the Guillotine!" point out that Diabolik was sentenced through a heavily biased trial: at the time there wasn't proof Diabolik even existed, only Ginko's word, that of Elisabeth Gay, whose testimony, while completely truthful, could be easily thrown out as the word of a jilted lover and/ mentally unstable woman (as she was on the verge of a mental breakdown during the trial) and that this man had admitted to have killed Walter Dorian and taken his place, with the murder happening in another country. The only things that could be proven having happened in Clerville were fraud, identity theft, and possession of stolen goods and possibly illegal weapons, and none of that was worth the death penalty, but Clerville was so terrified by the crimes attributed to Diabolik that the public, the judge, the jury, and even his own court-mandated lawyer were convinced of his guilt (and the lawyer unintentionally did a piss-poor job), and sentenced him to death without enough evidence to do so. An anti-death sentence activist actually appeals and tries to get a retrial on the principle that nobody, not even Diabolik, whose guilt has long since been proven, deserves this (and plans to defend him to insure he has proper defense, but has no illusion he'll get life without parole at best).
- The story also points out Clerville has an informal moratory against the death penalty, and they keep it on the books only for Diabolik. It's expected that the moment he's beheaded (or retried and sentenced to something else) the legislature will remove the death penalty from the books
- Aside for Ginko and his team, every single cop in Clerville treats it as an order to kill Diabolik on sight. It's implied every court in Clerville would pass it off as self-defense, and only Ginko's sheer honesty keeps him and his men trying to take Diabolik alive.
- Eva Kant's fury is something Diabolik himself fears: when Diabolik gets furious he usually just kills the offender, but Eva will make them suffer:
- What she did to her uncle, who convinced her father to dump her mother, drove her mother to suicide, had Eva locked in Morben boarding school, and murdered her father: after they met by chance years later and he didn't recognize her she seduced him so he would marry her and give her the right to bear her family name, told him who she really was on their wedding night (as even a rotten man as himself wouldn't dare to commit incest), tormented him for months, and when he tried to kill her by setting a panther on her, it ended with him being eaten by the panther when she accidentally set the panther on him. And to this day she continues to joke about his death, saying that it was a hunting accident.
- George Caron, secretary to the Minister of Justice in Clerville, tried to blackmail her into marrying him, using supposed evidence of her killing her husband-and not knowing that Diabolik, who had been arrested and was scheduled to be executed, had managed to give her his treasure and gadgets. Eva kidnapped him, bribed the jail guards into letting her meet Diabolik alone, and when he came she had him make a mask and drug Caron so he would follow all orders and get executed in his place with his body cremated as per Diabolik's will, while he would take Caron's identity and marry her. The plan failed because Ginko noticed the switch at the last second, but George Caron was still killed... And it was her idea.
- Once upon a time she happened to stumble on a rich wife basher. After robbing him with Diabolik she locked him in his own soundproof secret vault with the bodies of his bodyguards, waited a moment in which he thought he could get away thanks to the combination lock on the inside, and then proceeded to activate the security lock that could be deactivated only from the outside.
- Once Diabolik had been blinded in an explosion, and the first doctor she brought him to told them it was permanent. Then Eva learned the doctor loathed Diabolik for starting the chain of events that led to his brother's suicide, interrogated him under Truth Serum, and when he admitted he had lied and he could have cured Diabolik with a corneal implant she made him the donor... And left him alive. Upon learning who the donor was, Diabolik admitted he wouldn't have gone so far, looking a bit disturbed as she remorselessly pointed out that women can be far more vengeful than men.
- This one gets scarier when one remembers her initial reaction to the doctor telling her that Diabolik would be blind forever: she simply brought him back home, only telling him to never speak of what had happened to anyone and calming his fears of being killed for delivering the bad news. After all, it wasn't his fault that Diabolik was blind... Then she learned it was.
- Elisabeth Gay's madness, showing just why you should not make a Woman Scorned:
- After being released from the asylum she tracked down Diabolik, captured him, and started torturing him, planning to torture him to death-and deliver Eva the pictures. And when her husband Alberto Floriani found out and tried to stop her, she nearly killed him, only failing because Eva had tracked her down from the first batch of pictures. And she plainly admitted she did all of this because she still loved Diabolik and couldn't tolerate him taking Eva as a lover and accomplice.
- In the following years she convinced herself she loved Ginko, as he was the only one who hated Diabolik as much as she did... And drove Alberto crazy with her hate for the man who saved Diabolik from her. And so, in a desperate effort to win back her love, Alberto (who had been disfigured in a car accident) had plastic surgery to look like Ginko and concocted a plan that came close to killing both Diabolik and Ginko before Elisabeth mistook him from a disguised Diabolik and shot him. And he used to be such a nice guy...
- Even before Diabolik drove her mad, Elisabeth was pretty scary: back when they were living together Diabolik wondered if she would make a good accomplice, so he tested her... And, aside from the final hiccup (alerting Ginko they had met a guy Diabolik had killed) that cost her the place as his accomplice, she was just as effective as Eva and had all the manipulative skills one would expect from a psychiatric nurse.
- The story "Shadow of the Giustiziere". "Giustiziere" is an Italian word for someone who takes pursuit and enforcement of justice in their own hands in explicit and knowing violation of law... And this one is a terrorist bombing Clerville because they're insane enough to think the authorities are accomplices of Diabolik and wants to force them to capture and execute him, following some specific instructions (including using the very guillotine used for Diabolik's first attempted execution) to make sure it's not a fake.
- Ginko convinces Diabolik to give himself up by promising freedom for Eva... And warning him that if he doesn't the army will be sent to hunt him down.
- Diabolik's execution. And then the Giustiziere bombs again because they realized it was a ruse from the police (Ginko had actually convinced Diabolik to stay out of the way while they carried out the ruse and long enough for them to track the Giustiziere down).
- How the Giustiziere saw through the ruse: the executioner that was supposed to execute Diabolik the first time had secretly modified "his" guillotine with a safety that activated it only at the second attempt in case a pardon arrived at the last moment, and the Giustiziere, knowing about this, saw that the guillotine used in the ruse worked at the first attempt. It serves to narrow down the list of suspects to three people (the executioner and the two guards on death row from "The Arrest of Diabolik")... And shows just how bad Diabolik and Eva had been.
- Of the suspects, the (now retired) executioner is quickly exonerated once the police talks to him, one of the guards is dead, and the other guard, Hammer, had been jailed for years for his part in Diabolik's breakout in "The Arrest of Diabolik", and while there the other inmates, knowing he was a former prison guard, poured acid down his throat, making him a near mute.
- The Reveal of the Giustiziere's identity: Hammer's widow, who went insane during her husband's imprisonment, taught herself how to use a computer and make bombs for this plan, and when Hammer was released and tried to turn her in for her plan she killed him and hid his death to have a fall-guy. The fact she's a harmless-looking old lady that not even Diabolik or Ginko had suspected until Diabolik disguised himself as Hammer and she almost killed him manages to make everything the terrorist did even scarier.
- "The Bird of Prey" has a billionaire that, to take his revenge on Diabolik for an earlier heist, all but dares him to steal the statue of a bird of prey, one made with platinum with gems... But only after putting a capsule of uranium in its basement, knowing that Diabolik would get contaminated as he'd took out the gems and die of radiation poisoning.
- There is a cure for the poisoning, a complete blood transfusion, but it takes the blood of five or six people, and Diabolik is AB Negative. So Eva starts kidnapping donors of that type, at the fifth one Ginko is informed and immediately realises Diabolik needs blood... And makes things too dangerous for Eva to continue the kidnappings. The donors were completely exsanguinated.
- Diabolik's revenge: he put the bird of prey back where he had taken it, in place of the copy the billionaire usually keeps in his office right behind his desk. And he didn't take the uranium out.
- Ginko is an incredibly smart and brave police officer, who could easily go on a killing spree among criminals and get away with claiming self defense and knows that but stops himself with his own rules... So what could happen in a story titled "Ginko Without Rules"?
- Early in the story Ginko arrests a criminal who just murdered one of his friends, and when ordered to go to a therapist admits he'd have wanted to kill him and claim self defense but instead stopped himself. Later in the story he and his squad raid a criminal hideout with inside four criminals who force women to prostitute... And he kills them all, even risking to hit a hostage and then finishing off the one he hadn't killed on the spot, and then claims self defense. And as the women had escaped when he started shooting, the only witnesses were his cops, who testified in his favor.
- For the stunt above he's suspended pending investigation... So when the deputy inspector that took his place in organizing an escort asks for his advice he hatches a plan that risks the lives of multiple officers to be able to lure Diabolik and Eva Kant where he could just shoot them In the Back. And he actually wounds Eva.
- How the above happened: Ginko's therapist had a grudge against Ginko for arresting rather than killing the criminal who'd later murder his fiancee, and took the chance of the therapy sessions to hypnotize him into becoming The Unfettered and ruin his career this way. Thus the Ginko who casually killed four criminals and put at risk multiple cops' lives to ambush Diabolik and try to murder him... And he was still holding back, as the therapist hadn't yet managed to condition him into losing all his limits. Hence why Diabolik and Eva survived: Ginko's remaining rules made him shoot only once and threw off his aim.
- The story "Atomic Nightmare" is centered around a terrorist group who got their hands on a nuke trying to blackmail the government of Clerville. The situation is so bad that when Ginko finds Diabolik he does the unthinkable and knowingly lets him go, reasoning that there was a good chance he'd go after the terrorists himself (as he did, solving the situation rather than risking his turf) and that a nuclear threat takes the precedence for manpower over keeping Diabolik arrested long enough for execution anyway.
