alex toth's zorro the complete dell comics adventures

You get some great un-Tothy faces like this… The artwork in the second volume is better than in the first. He also owns up to some of the artwork not being his best, and wonders whether some of it has been altered by Dell afterwards. It’s not so expensive in comics, and Toth wanted to make changes, but wasn’t allowed by the editors at Dell.

It certainly explains the lack of fun and action: It’s more expensive to do adventurous scenes on TV, so you have people talking to each other for 95% of the time. He explains that the stories are mostly adaptations of TV scripts, adapted by the same people who wrote those scripts, and that they contained a lot of piffle. Toth does the introduction to the second volume himself, and he’s very candid. “Tee hee.” I think Zorro was almost unmasked (as the fop above) about forty thousand times during these 240 pages.

I’m beginning to believe that Toth didn’t really put much effort into this…īut still, there are some very nice panels here and there. But the plot is basically what you’d expect otherwise, and it’s boring as fuck. I had expected all these stories to be extremely repetitive, with Zorro outsmarting the stupid sergeant time and time again, and there’s certainly some of that, but there’s also change and development: Zorro gets some of his nemesises (that’s a word) sent off to jail, so it’s not a complete status quo. And since these panels are on the same page, I’m guessing Toth just spent more time on the panels that interested him more… Some panels look like either Toth didn’t really spend much time on it, or something went wrong during reproduction. The tones are kinda weird: Usually when you do this kind of tone, you have several different darkness levels (i.e., how tight the dots are), but it’s 100% completely flat in this book. And this certainly looks like it’s been drawn for a colour comic, but like somebody added zip-a-tone to this version.Īha! Toth did the guides and Eclipse added the tones. The Zorro comics I read back then were in colour, and in (just about) normal comics size. Howard Chaykin writes a lively introduction to the first of these two rather thick volumes (120 pages each) and explains that he’s been a lifelong Toth fan, and reports on some amusing anecdotes about Toth’s argumentativeness. And I read basically all comics that came across my path, but these were so cheesy that even I couldn’t stomach reading them.īut, of course, I don’t know whether the Zorro comics I reluctantly read back then were the Toth ones or some other anonymous artist from the Disney/Dell coal mines. I remember I had a translated version of some Disney Zorro stories when I was like eight, and I remember thinking that they were super-lame. Zorro: The Complete Classic Adventures by Alex Toth (1988) #1-2 by Alex Toth et al.

Alex toth's zorro the complete dell comics adventures