Number 987


Alex Toth's Zorro


IDW has issued Genius Isolated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth by Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell, editors. It's available from IDW, Amazon.com, or Bud Plant. I haven't seen it yet, but how can it miss? According to the promotional material it includes Toth work on the legendary Zorro comics from Dell.

Walt Disney's Zorro was a solid favorite TV show of mine when it came out in 1957. (Wasn't Disney a genius at getting his name in front of other people's creations? Zorro was created by writer Johnston McCulley, and originally appeared in the novel, The Curse Of Capistrano, in 1919.)

Actor Guy Williams became the Zorro for me. I had bought a couple of the Dell Four Color issues featuring Zorro which pre-dated the television program, but when the show came out the Disney marketing machine went full throttle. Dell's annual Zorro one-shots became Walt Disney's Zorro. Alex Toth did the origin story, and several stories for the series over the years. Warren Tufts did some very significant and fine work on the comic, also.

My copy of that 1957 Walt Disney's Zorro Four Color #882 is long gone, but I managed to pick up the series again in '65 when Gold Key reissued the comics beginning with #1, "Presenting Señor Zorro."

Number 986


The friendless killer and the killer goriller


"Kid Melton" would be just another anonymous crime story from an average issue of Lawbreakers Always Lose, which came out of the Timely/Marvel/Atlas bullpen of the late 1940s, but it achieved some notoriety when the splash panel was included in the infamous Seduction Of The Innocent by Fredric Wertham, M.D. I've had several postings featuring this book, and if you want more information click on Fredric Wertham in the labels below this posting.

Seduction Of The Innocent affected the comic fan world, and books with SOTI panels are highly valued. I'm always interested to see the stories behind the panels and usually wonder why the panel was singled out. Lawbreakers Always Lose #7 was published in 1948, several years before the 1954 publication of SOTI, and probably unavailable to most comic book readers when it came out.





Like "Kid Melton," "The Killer Who Walked Like A Man," from Lawbreakers Always Lose #10, also has artwork unidentified by Atlas Tales. It's footnoted on the listing as being very like "Murders In The Rue Morgue" by Edgar Allan Poe. It wasn't included in SOTI, and I have no idea how Wertham would have reacted. Would he have recognized the influence and did he consider Poe's work, even with its macabre subject matter and violence, an important part of American literature?

Poe aside, it has a gorilla, which Pappy's readers know is one of my personal non-guilty pleasures in comic books. A murderous gorilla in a suit, top hat and opera cape...that's all it needs to make the story stand out for me.

The New Yorker of April 11, 2011, explains Pappy's gorilla fetish.

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Number 985


Tomahawk begins


For a non-super character, Tomahawk lasted a long time for DC Comics. He was featured in Star Spangled Comics as a back-up strip, but soon took as cover feature. His own comic book lasted over 20 years, until the early '70s.

I liked the idea of Tomahawk set in a time frame of the American Revolution, a white man trained by Indians. But as we've shown before, DC Comics, who never met a wild concept it didn't like if it involved dinosaurs or gorillas, went far afield of the original frontier concept. A typically wild Tomahawk tale of the Go-Go Checks DC Comics of the 1960's was shown in Pappy's #848.

But this is the original Tomahawk tale, shown in Star Spangled Comics #69, from 1947. It's written by Joe Samachson and drawn by Edmond Good. Later on Tomahawk was taken over by writer France "Eddie" Herron and artist Fred Ray, but this first story paved the way, establishing Tomahawk for the next 25 years.

Number 984


Ibis goes batty


Early Fawcett Comics were a bit on the macabre side. The Captain Marvel stories weren't usually horror, but the non-Marvel tales often used horror. Ibis The Invincible #1, from whence this story comes, is that way.

I'm not sure who drew this. The last story I showed from Ibis #1 was in Pappy's #660 in January, 2010, and I said then the Grand Comics Database listed Pete Costanza with a question mark as the artist and Otto Binder as the writer. With this story they don't even have a guess, nor do I.

I used to own a copy of Ibis #1, which I sold over 20 years ago, and I've always regretted letting it go. Hell, I regret selling every comic book I've ever sold! That's why I don't sell them anymore. Anyway, I've taken this story from an online download.