Zorro: The Dailies - The First Year

Don McGregor's Zorro

by Don McGregor, Tom Yeates

This handsome landscape tome presents the classic Zorro newspaper strip from the 1990's. Written by award winning mystery author Don McGregor and gorgeously illustrated by modern master Thomas Yeates, this huge 248 page book is a must have for newspaper strip enthusiasts, western aficionados and Zorro fans everywhere.

Genres: Comics

248 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2001

About the author

Donald Francis McGregor is an American comic book writer best known for his work for Marvel Comics, and the author of one of their first graphic novels.

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zorro: The Dailies (The First Year) vol 1, has no vol 2, not yet anyway. Picking up where Alex Toth left off, Don McGregor moved on to write for Papercutz after the Dailies were ended.

This is perfect Zorro, realism combined with humanly heroic feats makes it one of the best superhero books around.

It's a shame vol 2 was never printed.

[Dominick · Rating 3 out of 5]

The rating here is based primarily on the art, by Tom Yeates (and later with the assistance of Tod Smith), which is luxurious (at least by recent newspaper comics standards), making excellent use of zip tone for shading and depth, as well as a great deal of exciting and vivid composition. The stories, well ... there's not much to them. We have here a year of continuity, consisting of two stories. The first is basically an extended chase scene that has little plot but serves, I guess to introduce the characters and tone. Sadly, the main villain, Quick Blade, with his gimmicky weapons, comes across more as a grade B super villain than an antagonist in historical adventure fiction. The second narrative tracks Zorro's attempt to ensure the body of a murdered Indian woman gets returned to her people and dealt with in accordance with her traditions, and to bring her killer to justice--but a newspaper comic Zorro can't kill people (bit of a problem in a narrative focusing on a swordsman). Again, the story is mainly a long chase scene, with some uneven attempts at humour. McGregor does some nice character touches occasionally, especially with perennial numskull Sergeant Garcia, but generally, I'd say this is nice to look at but doesn't offer much in the way of narrative satisfaction.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great find for fans of the old Disney TV show