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.
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Dialogue-heavy or not, this is a first-rate story adaptation! The panels have life, and the characters spring off the page. Alex Toth was a phenomenal artist!
ReplyDeleteI am a big fan of Zorro. Just this past summer I wrote a play in tribute titled "The Mark of Zetroc". I also wrote an afterword chronicling the history of Zorro from print to the big and small screens to the stage. I enjoyed this post and look forward to next week's continuation.
BTW, my favorite Zorro is Guy Williams, but Tyrone Power is next after him, The Tyrone Power version is arguably the best cinematic portrayal of the character. I re-watch it often. Of course, Duncan Regehr also did a creditable job, as well as Antonio Banderas.