Zorro's Double Danger

 

cover art by Sam Cherry

Johsnon McCulley's short story "Zorro's Double Danger" (West Magazine, February 1946) presents the swashbuckling hero with an interesting problem. He's scheduled to fight a duel in his identity as Don Diego Vega. But Don Diego is supposed to be a foppish weakling. Diego can't throw the fight, because that means getting killed or maimed. But he can't win without making people wonder how the young man suddenly became a skilled swordsman.

It began one morning when Don Diego and his mute servant Bernardo go shopping. While Diego is in the store, a jerk named Rojas begins to beat Bernardo for refusing to talk to him. He didn't realize Bernardo was mute, but doesn't care even when Diego calls him out on this. Servants exist to be beaten, after all.

Diego has no choice but to challenge Rojas to a duel. But that creates the problem discussed earlier. 

The answer? Well, Rojas beat up a peon, a class Zorro is sworn to protect. So Zorro can get a message to Rojas to meet him in a certain field the night before his duel with Diego. If Zorro wins that duel, Rojas won't be in a condition to fight Diego.

What Zorro doesn't count on is that Rojas isn't just a jerk, but a double-dog jerk. Maybe even a triple-dog jerk! When the masked hero arrives at the field to fight the duel, he discovers that Rojas has ratted him out and sent a squad of soldiers to capture him...

It's a great story. I'm afraid I haven't found this one online anywhere, so I can't provide a link to it. But the original Zorro stories have been reprinted. For anyone who enjoys a succinct, exciting adventure tale, these stories are worth tracking down.

Zorro's Secret Passage

 

The second and final story in Four Color #882 (February 1958) is--not surprisingly--an adaptation of the second episode of Disney's Zorro.

I mentioned last week that an Indexer Note on the Grand Comics Database said that, in addition to the art, Alex Toth did some unauthorized editing to the first story. There's no such note for this particular story, but I wonder if Toth had the same concerns about pacing and too much dialogue.

Because the first 4 pages of this 14 page story (29% of the entire tale) is given over to exposition, with Diego showing  Bernardo a hidden tunnel from his dad's house that leads to a huge cavern with a concealed second exit leading to the countryside. It's all necessary to setting up future stories and is enlivened by Toth's superb art. But it does slow the pacing down considerably.

The tale finally does get started. Captain Monastario stops by with a copy of Zorro's costume and a plan to have various vasqueros try it on. He's convinced he can identify Zorro by his bearing and his sword fighting style. Diego tries to convince him this plan is flawed, pointing out that he (Diego) would look like Zorro with the costume on. He then throws a sword fight with Monastario to prove he can't be Zorro. 

Monastario soon arrests some poor slob who fits into the costume and can't provide an alibi for Zorro's last appearance. This is because he won't admit he was with a girl and wants to protect her honor.

This obligates the real Zorro to make a standard nick-of-time appearance, show off enough brilliant swordsmanship to prove he is indeed the real thing, then use the the old "jump a crevasse with the only horse cool enough to do so" to escape pursuers. He ducks back home through the secret entrance and is ready to greet the soldiers as Diego, telling them he hasn't seen hide nor hair of that dastardly Zorro.

It's a good story and, as I already said, Toth's art is superb. There is an issue with pacing over the first few pages, but the story is short enough--and Toth's art fantastic enough--to get us past that and into the meat of the plot without us getting bored. Overall, Four Color #882 is a great adaptation of the TV series and a strong introduction to the character. 

Next week, Batman and Robin investigate a murder and fight robot monsters. 

Zorro--the Beginning

 

Arguably, the most fondly remembered adaptation of Zorro is the 1957 TV series, a product of the Walt Disney Studios and starring Guy Williams as the swashbuckling hero. 

And, in the 1950s, pretty much all TV shows got comic book adaptations. This iteration of Zorro jumped to the pages of a comic book in Dell's Four Color #882 (February 1958). An unidentified writer and artist Alex Toth give us two stories based on the first two episodes of the series. We'll look at "Presenting Senior Zorro" this week and "Zorro's Secret Passage" next week.

Toth's art is breathtakingly good--lively, fun to look at and telling the story well. But Toth apparently did more than illustrate the script. He also decided to do a little editing. An Indexer Note in the Grand Comics Database tells us this:

Toth was very unhappy having to work from adaptations of the TV shows' scripts, which he felt had too much dialogue and not enough action. In order to tighten up the storytelling, he deleted unnecessary dialogue and cut redundant captions wherever possible, which did not go over well with the Editor.

I can understand Toth's unhappiness. The episode is a good one, effectively setting up the premise for the series and giving us a great action scene at the climax. But because so much exposition is required, it is a tale that doesn't necessarily translate well into a graphic storytelling medium. Even with the changes that Toth apparently made, the story is somewhat dialogue heavy.

But Toth is one of those artists who is incapable of drawing an uninteresting panel. His great figure work and a constantly shifting camera angle from panel to panel keeps us interested as Don de la Vega comes home from Spain and adopts his milqtoast persona so that he can operate against the tyrannical government as Zorro.

The end result works well. There is still an argument that the story is too dialogue-heavy, but the pacing is still fast, all the elements of the series' premise are clearly established, and the climatic action scene, in which Zorro springs an unjustly imprisoned land-owner from jail, is wonderful. Reading through this issue reminds me of just how great an artist Toth was.

My favorite Zorro will always be Tyrone Power, but that probably in part because the Guy Williams series wasn't rerun in my locality when I was growing up and I've never seem more than a smattering of episodes. So I have less of an attachment to it than other Zorro fans. All the same, I've seen enough of the series to know how much fun it was and how much skill Guy Williams brought to the role. I think this adaptation brings appropriate honor to that.

As I've said--next week, well look at the second Zorro story from this issue. 

Cover Cavalcade

I'd also back away from Zorro in this situation, so I don't feel critical of the soldier at all.

The Heck with Continuity!

I like logical continuity in my fictional universes, but there are times when continuity simply gets in the way of a good story and gets tossed out the window.

Johnston McCulley knew that. A prolific writer for the pulp magazines, McCulley was responsible creating buckets-full of great characters, such the original Spider, the Green Ghost and Thubway Tham (a clever pickpocket who speaks with a lisp).

But, of course, his best-known creation is Zorro, who first popped up in a 1919 story serialized in All-Story Weekly. Anyone reading a blog like mine probably doesn’t need an explanation of who Zorro is. If you do—well, the rest of us are giggling at you behind your back and spreading malicious gossip about you to others.

The interesting thing about Zorro was that he was supposed to be a one-off character, not a series character. At the end of the original story—The Curse of Capistrano—the main bad guy is dead, Zorro’s real identity of Diego Vega is revealed and everyone who deserves to live happily ever after seems prepared to do so.

But then Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford stumbled across the story and decided to us it as the basis for the first movie from their new studio—United Artists. The movie, titled The Mark of Zorro (1920) was a big hit. The Curse of Capistrano was reprinted in book form—also now titled The Mark of Zorro—and McCulley realized he had a real money maker on his hands. He could write as many new Zorro stories has he wanted and always find a market for them.

But therein lay the problem. Zorro’s career was clearly over by the end of the book. And (unlike what Rafael Sabatini was able to do with Captain Blood) there was no real room within the plot to sandwich in “untold” adventures.

So how do you fit new Zorro stories into this tight continuity? The answer was simple: You don’t. McCulley simply retconned the character, bringing the main villain back to life and allowing Diego to simply resume his secret identity in order to battle despots, pirates and slavers. In effect, McCulley created a parallel universe to the original Zorro story.  Along the way, he dressed his Zorro in the black suit and mask that Fairbanks had worn in the movie and eventually expanded Diego’s full name to Diego de la Vega—probably just because all that looked and sounded cooler. (Or at least McCulley sometimes expanded the name to de la Vega. He was a little inconsistent with this.)

The world should be grateful that McCulley was fast on the retcon. The later Zorro stories often lacked the energy and spontaneity of the original novel, but they are invariably fun all the same.

“Zorro Raids a Caravan” (published in West magazine in October 1946) is a fine example of that. Diego suspects that a caravan heading through town is kidnapping locals to be sold as slaves. He also learns that a master swordsman is guarding the caravan.

As the foppish Diego, he not only collects this information, but manages to trick the swordsman into leaving the caravan for a time that night.  That allows Zorro to met and challenge the man alone, leading to a pretty cool sword-fight-while-on-horseback scene.

It’s a fun story, though not great. The cool parts come early, when Diego subtly uses his wimpy persona to gain information and set up the situation the way he wants it. Then he has that nifty sword fight. But the climax, in which he must dodge some of the governor’s soldiers and free the prisoners in the caravan, happens too quickly and seems too easy. And though the head slaver does get a comeuppance, I think Zorro let him off a little too easy. Another few hundred words and a greater element of suspense would have helped the story enormously.

But, after all, it is Zorro. If anyone is going to make foiling a slaver seem easy, it’d be him. Despite the story’s flaws, we are more than happy to tag along with the masked man whenever he wants to raid a caravan.