Alejandro

From Candypedia
Alejandro
GenderMale
Age23
Birthday1985
SpeciesCat
AffiliationAlejandro’s gang
ResidenceAlejandro’s apartment
DebutConfrontation, page 5
January 15, 2010 (2010-01-15)

Alejandro is an adult cat who runs a small gang around the Cinder Station area, with the dog Toby forever at his elbow and a neglected kid named Augustus doing his stealing for him. He entered the comic by betting a thirteen-year-old Mike twenty dollars over a bowl of liqueur chocolates, and the beating that followed in a dead-end alley has hung over Lucy ever since. He has never got over losing that fight to a pair of eighth graders. Funnily enough, nobody in the comic said his name out loud until Trapped.

Personality

Alejandro offers Augustus a home after learning nobody else seems to care.

Alejandro is a bully in the most literal sense, a grown man who picks fights with children and picks them carefully. He likes an easy mark, a quick bet, and an audience of one loyal dog, and he treats anything that goes wrong afterwards as a personal insult that somebody else will pay for. He is also, on close inspection, rather pathetic. The money he shakes down is pocket change, the empire he promises Augustus is a table of stolen groceries, and the kids who humiliated him were thirteen at the time. He is cheerful enough while someone is useful to him, and he turns nasty as soon as they stop being useful, or talk back.

He knows how to tempt an easy mark. In Confrontation he flatters a hungry Mike into an eating bet, only for Mike to win. When the now-drunk boy wanders into an alley and smashes his radio, Alejandro finds an excuse to demand the money back.[1][2][3] Once he has them cornered, the terms keep moving. Mike was supposedly “a few seconds over,” the broken radio is suddenly worth two hundred dollars, and a bunch of rich kids can surely handle it.[4] He sizes up a shoplifting child the same way in Trapped, checking that nobody at home cares before offering Augustus a place to stay.[5]

Alejandro blames the children for his humiliation before striking Augustus again.

He punishes anyone who annoys him, and the punishment is never in proportion. Sue gets punched in the nose for offering an opinion he did not ask for, and a page later she is choked and thrown into a pile of garbage bags.[6][7] His girlfriend Melanie gets her hair yanked for wearing it the way his ex used to, and Veronica’s commentary on that page says he punishes people for everything that makes him remotely mad.[8] After nearly strangling Melanie to death, he casts himself as the injured party and mocks Augustus for fainting over a little shoving.[9]

He also cannot let a humiliation go. Two years after Confrontation, a newscaster who happens to have white fur, blue eyes and a pink ribbon is enough to send him into a rage, and hearing that Lucy has moved away gets the remote thrown at the television.[10][11] “Fuckin’ kids made a fool outta me!” is how he explains it to Augustus while slamming him into a wall.[12] Veronica has said he does not think about Mike and Lucy constantly; he simply gets reminded now and then, and the people around him take the brunt of an impotent rage.[13] He would rather leave the hard work of revenge to someone else. He tells Augustus to find the kids so he can “do the rest,” and Augustus later observes that he prefers to delegate.[12][14] According to the authors, Augustus managed to talk him into leaving all the thinking and scheming to him.[15]

Appearance

The younger Alejandro has the same bandanna, but not yet the damage.

Alejandro is an adult cat, and a much bigger one than Mike, as Veronica has pointed out when asked about a rematch.[16] His outfit barely changes across the comic: a bandanna, a raglan shirt and fingerless gloves.[1] He was already “the guy in the bandana” as a younger man in the flashback of Trapped,[17] and the glove is distinctive enough that a single shadowy hand wearing it is recognisably his in Lucy’s nightmare in Line in the Sand.[18]

He carries a scar under one eye that he says came from the last girl who hurt him,[19] and a chipped tooth that came from Lucy’s knee in Confrontation.[20][19] At the beginning of the Trapped flashback he has neither the scar nor the cracked teeth.[21] In Lucy’s dreams in Escape Route and First-Degree Burn, he is drawn in shadow with a wide grin.[22][23]

Significant events

Mike arrives before Alejandro can finish what he started in Confrontation.

Alejandro first appears in Confrontation, when the eighth-grade gang wander into a bar in the Cinder Station area. He baits Mike into an eating bet, and once Mike is drunk he and Toby corner them in a dead-end alley to demand two hundred dollars.[1][4] He knees Paulo in the chest, beats Sue, and kicks the drunk Mike unconscious.[24][25] Lucy fights back, but Alejandro overpowers her before Mike comes to help.[26][27] He runs off bleeding after the two of them beat him.[28] Lucy shielding Mike from him is the image Mike keeps coming back to afterwards.[29]

At the end of the cast’s freshman year, in Moving On, he meets Augustus in an alley to collect a list of the kids’ classes and hangouts, and swears that Mike and Lucy will be hearing from him.[30]

Trapped, set two years after the alley, shows what became of that promise, which is nothing. Augustus is summoned to Alejandro’s filthy apartment, where Alejandro rages at the news that Lucy has moved away and beats Augustus for not having done anything about the kids yet.[31][12] Most of the chapter is a flashback to how Augustus ended up in his orbit as a small child. It also covers the years Alejandro spent abusing his girlfriend Melanie, which end with him strangling her over an affair and her grandmother taking her away.[32][33][34]

After Trapped, the gang’s calls keep the threat alive. By Augustus’s senior year he is reporting daily calls, usually from Toby, and he is still ignoring the phone in Made Fresh.[14][35] Lucy’s nightmares keep producing him, too: looming over her in Escape Route,[22] closing in behind her friends in First-Degree Burn,[23] and reduced to a gloved hand chasing her down the alley in Line in the Sand.[18]

Major relationships

Lucy

Even in First-Degree Burn, Alejandro still finds Lucy.

Lucy put up a fight Alejandro did not expect, and he has never forgiven her for it. He had not even noticed her in the alley in Confrontation,[36] and his first reaction was to leer, offering to let her friends go home if she would “stay with me tonight.” Veronica’s commentary on that page answers him with a flat reminder that she is a child.[36] Lucy played along just long enough to kick him in the crotch and knee his teeth in,[36][20] and from there the fight stopped being about money. He told her the last girl who hurt him gave him his scar and that he would show her how he paid that back,[19] then clawed her face, groped her and strangled her until she blacked out.[37][26] As Veronica puts it, Lucy cleaned up a lot before she was finally beaten.[16]

The fight stays with both of them. In Trapped, a newscaster with Lucy’s colouring is enough to set him off, and he calls her a “Cowardly bitch!” for moving away rather than waiting around to be found.[10][11] For Lucy, he has become the shape her nightmares take. In Escape Route he leans over her after Mike walks away and tells her she will always have him,[22] and in First-Degree Burn he is the last shadow closing in behind her silent friends.[23]

Mike

Mike’s drunken sense of justice proves surprisingly effective.

Years later, Alejandro still blames Mike for his humiliation in the alley. He also supplied the gang’s nickname for Mike. He christened him “green eyes” over the bar bet in Confrontation,[1] and the gang, Augustus included, kept using it.[38][30] In the alley he took the drunk boy apart with total contempt, sidestepping him, kicking the back of his head and grinding a heel into it.[25] Then Mike got up. Still drunk, he flying-kicked Alejandro off Lucy and, with her help, beat him until he ran.[27][28]

That is the fight Alejandro is still replaying. His parting vow in Moving On is that “Green eyes’ll hear from me soon enough.. him and his little girlfriend,”[30] and two years after the alley fight he is still shouting about a fool having been made of him.[12] Veronica, asked how a rematch would go, reckons a sober present-day Mike would be able to pummel him.[16]

Augustus

Alejandro gave a neglected Augustus somewhere he felt wanted, and he has been charging rent on it ever since. In the flashback of Trapped the younger Alejandro catches a small Augustus shoplifting milk, and instead of punishing him he praises him, asks whether his parents care, and invites him back to his apartment when the answer is no.[33][5] Over a table of stolen food he crowns the boy “a keeper” and their little mathematician, and promises the two of them are going straight to the top.[39] The top, in practice, is years of scavenging.[40]

By the time Augustus is in school with the main cast, he is Alejandro’s eyes there, handing over class schedules in Moving On while Alejandro warns him about “sleepin’ with the enemy” once Toby mentions his crush on Daisy.[30] The warmth is long gone by the present day of Trapped, where Alejandro eats his snacks, throws him against a wall, punches him and tells him to find the kids so he can do the rest.[31][12] Augustus stays because Toby holds a secret over him and because he has watched Alejandro lose it.[41] In the flashback he even parrots Alejandro’s contempt for Melanie after the attack on her,[9] but by Made Fresh he is letting the phone buzz and laughing at it.[42] The authors have described Alejandro’s appearances as a way of showing the rough place Augustus came from.[15]

Melanie

Augustus tries to stop Alejandro from strangling Melanie.

Melanie dated Alejandro during her high-school years, and sometimes hid from him. She introduces him to Augustus as her boyfriend who has “a temper,”[17] which is putting it kindly, and she takes refuge on a college campus he has been banned from just to get a break.[43] Augustus says he hits her after dreaming that she cheated,[44] and when she wears her hair a certain way he yanks it and screams “Don’t wear your hair like my ex!! I wish she was fuckin’ dead!”[8]

In her senior year Toby reports that she has been seeing someone else, but keeps Augustus’s identity to himself.[41] Augustus walks in on Alejandro, blood running from his eye, strangling her.[32] When Augustus comes round, Alejandro calls it “a li’l push an’ shove” and says she is lucky he did not give her what she deserved.[9] Her grandmother takes her away, giving her the escape she had been working towards.[34]

Minor relationships

Toby

In Confrontation, Alejandro arrives with the barking half of his operation.

Toby has been at Alejandro’s side since the bar in Confrontation, and he is the one who does the barking. In the alley that is literal, and it sets off Paulo’s phobia by accident.[4][24] By Augustus’s senior year it is the daily calls to Augustus, which usually come from Toby rather than his boss.[14][13] Alejandro treats him about the way he treats everyone: a smack when Toby lets slip that they are banned from a store,[21] and a “Take a break, Toby.” when Lucy drops him with a kick.[45] Toby initially watched Melanie’s strangling with his arms crossed,[32] before stepping in and taking her to hospital.[46][9] It is Toby rather than Alejandro who holds the blackmail over Augustus.[41]

Quotes

Oh, not much.. Just looking for my money back. With change. Alejandro, beginning the shakedown in Confrontation

LEARN YER FUCKIN’ PLACE, LITTLE GIRL! Alejandro, throwing Sue into the garbage in Confrontation

Just pick ’em off like mosquitoes. Alejandro, to Toby, over the beaten kids in Confrontation

Green eyes’ll hear from me soon enough.. him and his little girlfriend. Alejandro, to Augustus in Moving On

Ooh, I LOVE the caramel ones. How’d ya know? Alejandro, helping himself to Augustus’s snacks in Trapped

Lucky. I’d be in trouble if I gave her what she deserved. Alejandro, after strangling Melanie in Trapped

Trivia

  • Nobody speaks his name in dialogue until Trapped. Veronica’s commentary there remarks that characters like Augustus or Alej would just be unnamed creeps for ages.[17]
  • He and Toby were originally going to be the bullies from Paulo’s childhood. Veronica scrapped the idea as absolutely ridiculous, so Toby’s barking sets off Paulo’s phobia by pure coincidence.[24]
  • Veronica has described reworking him from a “4D-chess super kakkoi villain” into an “obsessive pathetic violent loser,” with the mastermind qualities going to Augustus instead.[47][48] She has also said she uses him to explore the rage and impotent desire for revenge she experiences as a person with BPD.[48]
  • A direct sequel, “Confrontation 2”, was planned back in 2006 and had hints seeded in the comic, including the Blasto contest. It may yet surface as a branching-path BCI story.[49]
  • In the alternate-continuity BCI comic All or Nothing, the night of Melanie’s strangling is rewritten: she beats him to death with a wrench.[50]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Chapter 14: Confrontation, page 5
  2. ↑ Chapter 14: Confrontation, page 6
  3. ↑ Chapter 14: Confrontation, page 8
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Chapter 14: Confrontation, page 9
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Chapter 86: Trapped, page 12
  6. ↑ Chapter 14: Confrontation, page 11
  7. ↑ Chapter 14: Confrontation, page 12
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Chapter 86: Trapped, page 26
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 Chapter 86: Trapped, page 31
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Chapter 86: Trapped, page 4
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Chapter 86: Trapped, page 5
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 Chapter 86: Trapped, page 6
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 “Ask response on how often Alejandro thinks about Mike and Lucy”. 2026-07-28.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 Chapter 102: Escape Route, page 6
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 “Ask response on Alejandro’s role in the story”. 2024-09-30.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 “Ask response on a Mike and Alejandro rematch”. 2026-04-08.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 Chapter 86: Trapped, page 13
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Chapter 127: Line in the Sand, page 5
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 19.2 Chapter 14: Confrontation, page 17
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 Chapter 14: Confrontation, page 16
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 Chapter 86: Trapped, page 11
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 22.2 Chapter 102: Escape Route, page 28
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 23.2 Chapter 125: First-Degree Burn, page 4
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 24.2 Chapter 14: Confrontation, page 10
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 Chapter 14: Confrontation, page 13
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 Chapter 14: Confrontation, page 21
  27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 Chapter 14: Confrontation, page 22
  28. ↑ 28.0 28.1 Chapter 14: Confrontation, page 25
  29. ↑ Chapter 17: Unfulfilled Fantasy, page 13
  30. ↑ 30.0 30.1 30.2 30.3 Chapter 40: Moving On, page 1
  31. ↑ 31.0 31.1 Chapter 86: Trapped, page 3
  32. ↑ 32.0 32.1 32.2 Chapter 86: Trapped, page 29
  33. ↑ 33.0 33.1 Chapter 86: Trapped, page 10
  34. ↑ 34.0 34.1 Chapter 86: Trapped, page 33
  35. ↑ Chapter 128: Made Fresh, page 45
  36. ↑ 36.0 36.1 36.2 Chapter 14: Confrontation, page 15
  37. ↑ Chapter 14: Confrontation, page 20
  38. ↑ Chapter 39: Love My Way, page 17
  39. ↑ Chapter 86: Trapped, page 15
  40. ↑ Chapter 86: Trapped, page 20
  41. ↑ 41.0 41.1 41.2 Chapter 86: Trapped, page 34
  42. ↑ Chapter 128: Made Fresh, page 44
  43. ↑ Chapter 86: Trapped, page 18
  44. ↑ Chapter 86: Trapped, page 25
  45. ↑ Chapter 14: Confrontation, page 14
  46. ↑ Chapter 86: Trapped, page 30
  47. ↑ “Ask response on reworking Alejandro’s character”. 2026-06-09.
  48. ↑ 48.0 48.1 “Ask response on Confrontation and Alejandro’s rework”. 2026-04-08.
  49. ↑ “Ask response on the planned Confrontation 2”. 2026-06-02.
  50. ↑ All or Nothing, page 16 🔒 (members only)
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