Happy 100th Anniversary, Zorro!This month, we celebrate the 100th anniversary of Zorro, first create

Happy 100th Anniversary, Zorro!

This month, we celebrate the 100th anniversary of Zorro, first created in Johnston McCulley’s 1919 serialized story, “the Curse of Capistrano.” The most surprising thing about this story is that it is a “one shot.” At the end, Zorro gives up his identity forever.

The magazine that Zorro was published in was the All-Story, also called Argosy, which was the first true story pulp magazine as we know it, and got it’s start publishing Horatio Alger, but also was the place that gave the world Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, and when it became a paranormal mag in the 1960s, it first published the myth of the “Bermuda Triangle.” 

As a collector, I own a few Argosy/All-Storys myself, and the best part is going through them and finding letters by H.P. Lovecraft, who’s weird letters come off as nothing so much as the modern day version of weird and rambling comments on youtube videos by a shut-in, and they often published letters by others addressed to Lovecraft, just to dunk on him. 

Johnston McCulley was all around obsessed with Southern California history, and wrote several novels set in the past of California. “Curse of Capistrano” was, incredibly enough, just one of these works.