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Review: ‘Zorro’ The Complete First and Second Seasons

Review: ‘Zorro’ The Complete First and Second Seasons

Walt Disney had a gift, an ability to take someone else’s property and recraft it for a modern audience. Just about every time he touched a fairy tale or legend, he struck paydirt.  Look what he did with Grimm’s fairy tales or A.A. Milne’s [[[Winnie the Pooh]]]. Largely overlooked these days is the incredibly popular 1950s television series based on Johnston McCulley’s pulp hero, Zorro.

The black and white series, starring Guy Williams, ran a mere two seasons but spawned over 500 licensed merchandise items in addition to enjoying a long syndicated run in the 1960s and again after the birth of the Disney Channel. Back in the ‘50s, the season ran 39 weeks and a half-hour show actually had 25 minutes of story so there was plenty of material to recycle.

Fortunately, Walt Disney Home Entertainment noted the enduring appeal of the character and has this week released the complete run in two attractively packaged volumes. Both volumes are available in numbered limited edition tins that come complete with certificate of authenticity, label pin, black and white still of [[[Zorro]]], and a booklet detailing the contents.

Leonard Maltin, who grew up watching the series when it originally ran on ABC from October 10, 1957 through June 2, 1959, provides introductions to seasons one and two, providing some context and information that nicely sets the stage. The seasons nicely fit into five discs and both volumes contain a sixth disc with bonus material.

McCulley’s somewhat clunky prose style was full of ideas: that of a masked avenger rising to protect the citizens of the small town of Los Angeles in the early part of the 19th century. Taking a cue from the precedent set by Baroness Emmuska Orczy’s [[[Scarlet Pimpernel]]], introduced a decade before in 1903. Don Diego de la Vega decided he needed to play the fop so no one would suspect he was the black-cloaked fox known as Zorro.

The stories fired the imagination and were quickly adapted to screen, first in the silent films and then in the movie serials before it enjoyed feature film status. Along the way, McCulley actually incorporated some of the changes made for film into his prose. In 1952, Disney tried to acquire the rights and it took him until 1957 before it was a done deal. In September 1957, on his Walt Disney Presents,  Uncle Walt told stories to his Mousekteers on his fourth anniversary show and it was used to introduce Williams as Zorro, leading people to watch the show which debuted weeks later.

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Happy 25th Anniversary, ComicMix comics!

Happy 25th Anniversary, ComicMix comics!

  • News
  • November 2, 2009

Twenty-five months ago today, ComicMix debuted our first new comics online, the return of GrimJack in the tale of the Manx Cat, a series that is now available in print from our friends at IDW. It was followed within the first week by EZ Street, Black Ice, Munden’s Bar, The Adventures of Simone & Ajax, and Fishhead.

*Okay, we’ve been so crazy busy around here that we completely skated past our two year anniversary at the beginning of last month. But now we get to have a 25th anniversary!**

**Look, if X-Factor can have a 50th anniversary issue this month and a 200th anniversary issue next month, we can have a 25th anniversary today. So there.

Review: ‘Plastic Man the Complete Collection’

Review: ‘Plastic Man the Complete Collection’

There are many reasons why Plastic Man has endured as a comic character starting with the imaginativeness of Jack Cole’s stories. He was the first elastic hero. The first hero who started life as a criminal only to reform when he inherited his powers. He was also one of the few truly amusing animated series from the 1970s.

[[[The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show ]]]snuck in at the end of the decade, lasting two seasons from 1979-1981, and was a fun offering from Ruby-Spears. The 35 solo Plastic Man adventures have been collected by Warner Home Video in a four disc set, now available.

While Plastic Man: The Complete Collection
is the title, it’s not entirely accurate since the Comedy/Adventure Show featured segments dedicated to Baby Plas, Plastic Family, Might Many & Yukk, Fangface and Fangpuss, and Rickety Rocket and none are collected here.

The series, which benefitted from the writing talents of comics veterans Mark Evanier, Steve Gerber, Roy Thomas, and Norman Maurer among others, was playful in a way most other Saturday morning fare was not. The show arrived at a time when networks were overly concerned with cartoon violence and how viewers may try and imitate the antics seen on screen. As a result, their other recent offerings of Saturday morning cartoons from the 1960s and 1970s contained a ridiculous warning that they were not suitable for children. Tellingly, this collection does not include that warning.

While the animation team wanted to emulate Cole’s manic style, ABC insisted on a fresh approach which unfortunately left Plas saddled with the fawning girlfriend Penny (who subsequently married him and mothered Baby Plas) and Hula-Hula, the comedic sidekick in the Woozy Winks role. The rotund Hawaiian was given Lou Costello’s character and vocal characteristics which softened his buffoonery.  They globe-trotted from case to case aboard their jet, directed by their Chief, an attractive older woman who barely tolerated her ductile detective.

Each exploit pitted the trio against dastardly villains, most of whom desired wealth and power although a few had motivations that smacked of social relevance such as the Weed in the very first episode. The foes are nicely varied and interestingly, Toyman arrives for repeat appearances which is odd considering they never fought in the comics. In fact, only two foes from Plas’ comic books are used: Dr. Dome, introduced in the short-lived 1960s series, and Carrot Man, who debuted during his more creatively satisfying series from the mid-1970s.

Like Cole’s original stories, Plas reshapes himself into a variety of objects to go undercover and viewers see him since he retains his red and yellow costumed appearance. He never takes things too seriously and has some good quips to keep things light.

The episodes are supplemented with two special features. The first is a 14 minute mini-documentary on the character’s history and appeal. In addition to the usual talking heads of Jerry Beck and Mark Evanier, ComicMix’s own Alan Kistler contributes many cogent thoughts. The other extra is the unaired 10 minute pilot produced for the Cartoon Network in 1996 by a new generation of animators, including DC veteran Stephen DeStefano. It’s a very different look but equally amusing tale and one wonders why it was not picked up.

If this is the Plastic Man you grew up watching, then this is the DVD set you’ve been waiting for. If you’re unfamiliar with the character, I strongly recommend the DC Archives volumes reprinting the Cole stories which remain inventive and fun.

‘Wanted’ director Timur Bekmambetov produces ‘Black Lightning’ movie – see the trailer now!

‘Wanted’ director Timur Bekmambetov produces ‘Black Lightning’ movie – see the trailer now!

All right, so Black Lightning is the translation of the movie title Черная молния from Russian.

And it probably won’t have that name when it gets released in the United States, as it has as much to do with the DC Comics character created by Tony Isabella and Trevor Von Eeden as Mr. Miyagi’s protege has to do with the Legion of Super-Heroes. (Hmm. Maybe not the best example there.)

But it’s still a great deal of fun. Take a look:

Now, if you actually want to see more work from Black Lightning’s creators, we’re happy to show you the latest chapter of The Original Johnson by Trevor Von Eeden here on ComicMix just up today (the print edition is available for pre-order now in the Diamond catalog, hint hint) and you can visit Tony’s web site for great reviews and commentary.

Review: ‘Stitches’ by David Small — a comics memoir of an amazingly bad childhood

Review: ‘Stitches’ by David Small — a comics memoir of an amazingly bad childhood

Stitches: A Memoir
David Small
W.W. Norton, September 2009,
$24.95

You can’t write a memoir these days unless you had a bad
childhood – call it the Law of Oprah. You have to have some horrible secrets,
either your own or those of your parents/keepers/guardians, that you can
reveal, tearfully, to an enthralled TV audience when called upon. You may not
make it to that TV-show couch, since the competition for a bad-enough childhood
is fierce, but that’s the aim. Memoirs of anything positive are utterly passé –
even a book like Eat Pray Love needs to
start with heartbreak before it can get to happiness.

Then there’s the unrelated but equally unsettling
requirement that only non-fictional graphic novels can be taken really seriously by the outside world. From [[[Maus to Persepolis]]], from [[[Fun Home to Palestine]]], it’s only respectable if it’s real. As far as our mothers and cousins and next-door neighbors know, “graphic novels” means expensive comic-book stories about either superheroes or the author’s tormented relationship with his family.

[[[Stitches]]] is perfectly positioned at the intersection of those two publishing trends: it’s the true story of author David Small’s appalling childhood, told as comics pages with cinematic “camera motions” that will appeal to readers not used to reading comics. Even the art style Small uses in Stitches adds to the seriousness; Small has a sketchy, loose line of variable width here, strong to define the figures and lighter and looser for backgrounds, and washes in various tones of grey. In fact, the whole
book is grey – even the black line looks like just another shade of the murk.

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Comical Lives: A Paired Review of ‘Little Nothings 2’ and ‘Giraffes in My Hair’

Comical Lives: A Paired Review of ‘Little Nothings 2’ and ‘Giraffes in My Hair’

  • News
  • October 19, 2009

The impulse to anecdote is ubiquitous in mankind; we all
want to tell our own stories. Since those stories happened to us, we naturally think that they’re fascinating…and
sometime are surprised when the rest of the world doesn’t agree with us. Comics
creators have been spilling out their lives onto their pages for a few decades
now – since the undergrounds, if not before that – and the autobiographical comic
is now its own cliché. But there’s still room to do interesting things with autobiographical
materials – at least, I hope
there is, since it seems that we’re destined to be deluged with books of true
stories…

Little Nothings, Vol. 2: The Prisoner Syndrome
Lewis Trondheim
NBM/ComicsLit, March 2009,
$14.95

Trondheim mostly makes fictional comics – Dungeon and Kaput and Zosky and Mister O and many more – but he also has kept a comics blog
in French, mostly focused on the small moments of his life. Three collections
from the blog have been published in his native France; the first two have been
translated so far for the English-speaking world. (I reviewed the first one
here back in March of last year.)

For the “Little Nothings” blog, Trondheim works in
watercolor, mostly in single pages – each one the record of a single event, or
a short conversation. The emphasis is on observation – each strip is a crystallized
instant, and clearly the blog as a whole is not intended to seriously chronicle
Trondheim’s life. As with the Dungeon
books, all of the people are drawn anthropomorphically – Trondheim and his
family are various kinds of bird, and most of the others look like different
kinds of mammals – rats and dogs and cats. (In the usual unsettling way of
anthropomorphic comics, Trondheim’s family also has a pair of real cats, Orly
and Roissy, and other actual animals show up from time to time.)

Either Trondheim travels an awful lot or travel is more
conducive to diary comics than his regular life, since a clear majority of the
comics here are about trips – to the Angouleme comics festival (a year when he
was the Guest of Honor), several other comics events, and vacation in Greece,
Guadeloupe, and Corsica. That does keep Prisoner Syndrome from being a succession of Trondheim-sitting-at-his-desk
pages – there are a number of those, of course, since that’s where a cartoonist
spends most of his time – and ties nicely into the title. In one of the early
strips in this book, Trondheim learns about “Prisoner Syndrome,” in which
people who spend all of their time in the same place gradually get more and
more tired from doing less and less – and so he decides to go to more comics
festivals, to keep himself healthy.

There are no grand gestures in Prisoner
Syndrome, no deep thoughts or big
moments – the series is called Little
Nothings for a reason. But there
are many thoughtful little moments, of the kind that make up all of our lives,
and Trondheim is an artful and nuanced portrayer of his own internal life. It’s
a lovely book of the small things that go together to make up an everyday life.

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Review: ‘High Moon’ Volume One

Review: ‘High Moon’ Volume One

High Moon
Dave Gallaher & Steve Ellis
DC Comics, 192 pages, $14.99

DC’s online imprint, Zuda Comics, has certainly been a hit or miss affair but when it hits, there’s a pleasure in discovering new talent or new concepts. While [[[Bayou]]] was a breakout hit, the most consistent entry remains [[[High Moon]]], written by former ComicMix contributor Dave Gallaher, illustrated by Steve Ellis and lettered by Scott O. Brown.

Gallaher had this notion for years but managed to earn one of the inaugural slots when Zuda went live in late 2007 and the strip won the first reader contest. It has since received plaudits from around the field and now DC is releasing the first three stories in a trade paperback.

The three stories comprising the first volume mix the western and horror genres with a dash of steampunk and overly, it’s a breezy, entertaining read. The focal point surrounds the Macgregor family, a line of detectives, currently working as a branch of the famed Pinkertons. Matthew Macgregor takes center stage in the first story while brother Tristan arrives for the second tale and then Tristan and Fergus deal with demons in the final tale. Linking all three, though, is Eddie Conroy a werewolf with a haunted past.

Each tale takes place in a different locale, starting with the drought-stricken Blest, Texas, then moving on to Ragged Rock, OK before concluding in South Dakota.

Across these stories are vampires, werewolves, demons, sexy Indians and a lot of atmosphere. We are given details in drips so reading the three stories in one sitting helps build the world of High Moon and it’s a nice place to visit.  Gallaher’s dialogue is spare and distinct while Ellis works wonders with the static format of the Zuda reader, playing with page design when the action demands it. His use of color goes a long way towards giving the strip a nice atmosphere.

We could use a little more grounding in the time and place when these stories take place and what the ground rules are for the occult aspects but these are minor quibbles for what is a strong series which returns to the web with a fourth installment this fall.

Fathers and Sons: reviews of Danica Novgorodoff’s ‘Refresh, Refresh’ and ‘The Big Kahn’ by Neil Kleid and Nicolas Cinquegrani

Fathers and Sons: reviews of Danica Novgorodoff’s ‘Refresh, Refresh’ and ‘The Big Kahn’ by Neil Kleid and Nicolas Cinquegrani

  • News
  • September 30, 2009

I should start by quoting something weighty – the most
obvious would be that old Tolstoy saw about happy and unhappy families – but
let’s take that as written, shall we? Comics have given short shrift to
families for the past seventy years – at least, the American comic-book
industry has, though strip comics grew fat and bloated on the hijinks of
aggressively “relatable” families for that long and longer.

Even the undergrounds – typically about countercultural
types, who occasionally complain about their parents but try to avoid them as
much as possible – and the modern alt-comics movement (Alienated Loners R us!)
avoided family dynamics. Sure, there are exceptions, from Will Eisner to art
spiegelman, but the average American comics protagonist is an orphan – or wishes
he was.

Maybe that’s starting to change, or maybe I just have a couple
of anomalies on my hand. Either way, today, I have two books where that isn’t the case – not to say that these dads might not be
dead, absent, or problematic, but they’re definitely part of the story. And
their sons care who, and what – and where – their fathers are.

Refresh, Refresh
A graphic novel by Danica
Novgorodoff, adapted from a screenplay by James Ponsoldt based on the story by
Benjamin Percy
First Second, October 2009,
$17.99

What do men do? For many in the comics reviewing world,
that’s an easy question: men punch each other in the face. But they don’t have Refresh,
Refresh in mind when they say that. This graphic
novel is set in a small Oregon town, just a couple of years ago, where most of
the adult men are off fighting with the Marines in Iraq. And their sons –
mostly Cody and Josh and Gordon, three highschool-aged boys who are at the core
of this particular story – talk about joining up when they’re old enough, or
working in the local factory, or maybe even getting out.

But Refresh, Refresh
is based on a literary short story, and if there’s one thing we all know, it’s
that there’s no getting out of a story like that – it’s all doom and gloom
until the moment-of-clarity ending. So this town is stifling and without any
options, the boys drifting – from backyard boxing to underage drinking in bars
to racing around on motorbikes and sleds – as they rebel without any fathers to
drag them into line. (The narration – presumably taken from the original Percy
story; I don’t want to blame Novgorodoff for any of it – is particularly
heavy-handed in that area, such as this sequence from p.83: “We didn’t fully
understand the reason our fathers were fighting. We only understood that they
had to fight. ‘It’s all part of the game,’ my grandfather said. ‘It’s just the
way it is.’ We could only cross our fingers and wish on stars and hit refresh,
refresh, hoping they would return to us.”)

What they hit “refresh, refresh” on is their e-mail
in-boxes; that scene recurs several times in the story. Oddly, though, it’s the
only incursion of modern technology into a story that could otherwise be
Vietnam-era. They don’t follow their fathers’ platoon on CNN.com or an Armed
Forces website; don’t call each other on cellphones; don’t think about or track
or seem to notice the war on TV or the Internet; even their laptops seem to be
screwed down to tables, for all the moving they do.

Refresh, Refresh is a very traditional story about young men in
small towns; I could probably quote half-a-dozen Bruce Springsteen songs on
roughly the same topic, and with pretty much the same moral and tone. (And that’s
without diving into the world of the realist short story, where kitchen-sink
dramas almost require young men with promise to be squandered.) Novgorodoff
tells this version with a bit too much self-conscious artistry – too many deer
looking up at airplanes, too many of those explaining-the-theme narration boxes
– but she keeps the focus tight and specific, on these three boys and their
world, their choices and possibilities. A story like this is nearly always
about badchoices, though, so it
would be best to come to Refresh, Refresh with a MFA-teacher’s fatalism, and not expect anything so comic-booky
as a happy ending for the boys who punch each other in the face.

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‘Superman/Batman: Public Enemies’ on Sale Today

‘Superman/Batman: Public Enemies’ on Sale Today

  • News
  • September 29, 2009

Superman/Batman: Public Enemies is released today in a variety of formats: Blu-Ray Hi-Def edition, a special edition 2-disc DVD, and a single disc DVD. Warner Home Video will distribute the action-packed movie, which will also be available OnDemand and Pay-Per-View as well as available for download that same day.

As you know by now, this animated feature is based on the Jeph Loeb/Ed McGuinness graphic novel collecting Superman/Batman #1-6. Bruce Timm is executive producer. Michael Goguen is supervising producer. Sam Liu is directing a script written by veteran Stan Berkowitz.

In the film, United States President Lex Luthor uses the oncoming trajectory of a Kryptonite asteroid to frame Superman and declare a $1 billion bounty on the heads of the Man of Steel and his “partner in crime,” Batman. Heroes and villains alike launch a relentless pursuit of Superman and Batman, who must unite – and recruit help – to stave off the action-packed onslaught, stop the asteroid, and uncover Luthor’s devious plot to take command of far more than North America.

ComicMix will be reviewing this in the near future. For now, enjoy the clip below.

ComicMix Quick Picks – September 24, 2009

ComicMix Quick Picks – September 24, 2009

If you need further proof that we here at ComicMix love you and want you to be happy, check out these, our Quick Picks of stuff we didn’t get to yesterday.

What else did we miss? Consider this an open thread.

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