The hat takes up more space than the face, and the hat’s just a few lines. You’ve got Zorro in extreme close-up, defined by one eye, his mustache, and the black swath of his mask. It’s a very simple panel, but incredibly effective. The relative simplicity of the later stories, in fact, plays to one of his primary philosophies:Īnd, man oh man, does he ever do that. It’s still Toth, though, and Toth was never anything less than professional. As the stories go on, he’s obviously spending less time on each page, putting in less background detail and having less fun with the art in general. If this is what Toth hacking it out looks like… In his introduction to the black and white second volume, in fact, he apologizes to the reader for hacking so much of it out. He couldn’t make the book as good as he knew it could be, so he put less and less effort into it with each passing issue.
So his enthusiasm slowly waned as he realized that he was stuck with leaden scripts filled with unnecessary dialogue and unimaginative staging. The stories were adapted from TV episodes, and Toth was given very little leeway to change or interpret anything. Dell’s license, however, was for an adaptation of the 1950s Walt Disney television series starring Guy Williams (who later went on to play Will Robinson’s dad on Lost in Space). He was offered the Zorro strip after Dell picked the license up, and he jumped at the chance to do it because he was such a big fan of the 1940 film with Tyrone Power. Interestingly, though, Toth himself didn’t think much of the work. But more than that, stripping out the color really lets you get down to the base drawing.
Taking the cheap 1950s comics printing techniques into account, it actually looks very good indeed. It’s still a very nice-looking page, I’ll grant you. Here’s the above page, as it originally saw print in an issue of Dell Four-Color: Which is fine, but maybe didn’t serve Toth’s lines as well as the black and white treatment. The original comics, however, were in color. One thing I should probably mention here: the Eclipse editions reprinted the Zorro stories in black and white, with new gray tones laid in by Toth himself.
Classic adventure cartooning, with Toth’s flair for setting and composition. They’re beautiful comics, so (since I’m short on time this week) here’s a gallery of the artwork, showing off exactly how good Toth really was. So I had the opportunity recently to pick up the old Eclipse Comics two-volume set reprinting Alex Toth’s Zorro stories from the 1950s.
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