I’m officially starting to get worried for my homie Murph the Great. After an extensive string of can’t do no wrong bonafide hits, one after the other after the other he’s kind of fallen off the wagon. It kinda happened right when the majestic Batman: The White Knight series ended. Since then he’s dropped, or more like plopped, a comic called ‘Plotholes’ which had this wacky idea that some rag tag group of literary archetypes were going around and saving books from having bad plots. It was genuinely ironic since this group should have been working on their own comic. It was the first time in history that I stopped pulling a Murphy comic. Now there’s this: Zorro.
Before I even get into the Big Z, I have to ask, what the hell is going on with the supposed White Knight: Wonder Woman and White Knight: Justice League? I thought that was coming down the pike after he was done with Bats? Weren’t we all super duper psyched for this shit? He teased it at the end of his last White Knight and we all almost spontaneously combusted, at least I did. Since then? Nada. This is the equivalent of sending me nudes on a dating app and then deleting me from your chat the next day.
I literally just googled for White Knight Wonder Woman and got jack diddly poo. I did the same for Justice League, where are they? Am I using the wrong search terms? Is it on the dark web? Has it been renamed The Indigenous Knight and the Wonder Person by DC for their DEI/ESG score? The last update is from February of last year! What the hell! Has it been canned??? DC! You rat bastards, what hast thou done!?!?
See, now this makes sense. If I’m Murph, I’m totally floored. While his hot wife Katana is out on tour promoting her erotic fiction he’s probably at a dive bar in Sherman Oaks, drowning his sorrows over some piss water made by some hipsters in Glendora while munching on a basket of fake potato GMO fries made from monkfruit and bugs. I bet during his drunken stupor a fanboy waddled over to him and encouraged him to keep the creative juices flowing. That’s when Murphy pitched the kid in the Bat Suit below the idea he came up with when he was 10 years old and working for the school library, the one about the literary characters saving books from bad writing.
The fanboy probably exclaimed “That sounds awesome dude!” Then Murph, after puking up the bug fries on the fanboy’s sailor moon t-shirt, probably pitched him dream his project of doing a Zorro book set today amidst the Mexican Cartel crisis. The fanboy, now sensing he could get an inapproptiate handy from Murph and then sue him for it later, probably extolled the idea as genius and asked Murph to follow him to the Men’s room. I hope Murph passed out by this point.
Anyway, where to begin, umm, yeah, sure, let’s put a kid who’s been a mute since his childhood due to his dad being shot to death in public by the Cartel for simply dressing up as a fictional character, all of a sudden decide to don the costume and take on the cartel after his sister, who for some ridiculous reason has been working for the Cartel as a driver, shoots one of their henchmen. Of course the kid carves a Z into one of the henchmen who returns to the cartel with a bloody Z on his chest.
The only logical follow up from this development is if in the following issue the kid in the Zorro outfit is carved up with the entire alphabet on his body with some cuneiform and Sanskrit thrown in for shits and giggles. I can’t even begin to describe what would happen to his sister. Hmm, perhaps this is what our raging border crisis needs! Zorro! Some dude in a black silk outfit and an epee swash buckling his way up and down the Rio Grande is what this country needs! That’s what will stop the fentanyl from pouring into the country, why didn’t we think of this earlier?!?
Maybe the timing of this book isn’t right. Maybe if it was released in the 80s or 90s when drug culture and the idea of the cartel was more of a romantic notion than a real one. But I dunno, if you had a comic where Flash Gordon saves the world from school shootings I think it’d be a clunker if it was released next week. I think that’s why it’s so frustrating that hero books suck so bad right now. It would be wonderful if we could escape for a few minutes into an amazing hero comic these days. Escape into a world where the good guy actually does take down the bad guy since our world doesn’t seem to provide much of that at all. The genius of Murphy was that he created a completely new world for Bats and used it to work through a lot of themes and story lines that would never have been possible in the normal DC Universe. It’s why it worked so brilliantly and it’s why I’m fucking dying for more. Alas, the well has run dry.
Look, Batman no matter what alternative Universe he’s from isn’t gonna be able to take down the Cartel, you think a kid who’s been working on his fencing skills with Gramps is going to do it??? I get that in a world that has gone mad we feel helpless and in moments of despair we fantasize about fantastical wild solutions to complex and savage problems. But the idea of ‘Zorro takes on the Cartel’ should have been shot down in a pitch meeting like a clay target at a skeet shooting range. Howeverrrrr, I will say this, it’s only four issues and it be slim pickings out there so I’m probably gonna drop the remaining $12 on the remaining 3 issues unless issue 2 really jumps a whole ocean of sharks. Murphy can still draw his ass off and you know what? Sure, Zorro and his Sis vs. the Cartel, and go! Let’s see what you got.
Maybe Murphy needs to send his Zorro to a local Whole Foods. He can do that thing that the bouncing smiling face did in those Walmart commercials as it slashed prices. The Big Z can bound down the aisles on his horse slashing prices back to 2019. Now that would be some heroic shit right there: Dude, Zorro just reduced my organic free range non GMO eggs down from $12 to $6! Wait, I think that's just the homeless dude from outside on a stuffed animal...
Rating: 7.3
Verdict: Pull for the Name not the Game.
