Antonio Banderas in a scene from The Mask of Zorro

Los Angeles, June 29: He seems like a devil-may-care playboy, pursuing women and good times in equal measure. Yet that’s only a ruse: In reality, he’s a masked hero who emerges from a secret hide-out to fight injustice wherever he finds it.

Bruce Wayne and his alter ego, Batman? No. It’s the original Caped Crusader ? Zorro. And 86 years after he first appeared in a pulp magazine story, the early 19th century California hero is poised to become the next pop culture craze. Consider:

Zorro, a novel by Isabel Allende about his origins, has received enormous critical praise and become an instant bestseller.

The Legend of Zorro, the sequel to 1998’s The Mask of Zorro, opens on October 28. The film reunites Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, stars of the original.

The first of a three-part Zorro comic series, Scars!, hit the streets last month.

The Mark of Zorro, the original novel by former newspaperman Johnston McCulley, will be re-released in August.

So why Zorro? And why now? It’s not just about advance hype for the movie, says Don McGregor, writer of the Scars! comics. The popularity of Zorro (Spanish for “fox”), he says, is based on “the old axiom that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Zorro sees the abuse of power in high places and he is going to do something about it. That stirs something in people.

He’s also a very sexy character; he loves women, women know it, and they love him. And he doesn’t take himself too seriously.”

“Zorro can be any person,” adds Sandra Curtis of Berkeley-based Zorro Productions, which owns the rights to the character. “He doesn’t have special powers. He’s athletic, bright and witty, but he doesn’t have superpowers. ”

That Everyman made his debut in 1919 in The Curse of Capistrano, a short story by McCulley that appeared in the pulp publication All-Story Weekly.

The tale quickly attracted the attention of silent film star Douglas Fairbanks, whose 1920 feature The Mark of Zorro is not only regarded as one of the great movies of the pre-sound era but also established the Fox as a multimedia sensation: Nearly 60 movies have been made with Zorro’s name in the title (including the 1940 Tyrone Power classic The Mark of Zorro), and seven TV series have featured the character, the most famous being the 1957-59 Disney show starring Guy Williams.

Yet the swashbuckling hero and his daredevil exploits have also proved problematic to some members of the Latino community. Critics argue that Zorro plugs into classic stereotypes of the Latin lover fighting an endless series of inept Mexican villains and that these media representations of early California tend to ignore its multiethnicity and cultural complexity.

“The image of the swarthy and mysterious Spanish hero creates a romanticised image of Latino prowess,” says UCLA English professor Rafael Perez-Torres.

“The Zorro character is Criollo, a white Spaniard born in the New World of purely Spanish blood. In the famous TV series, the Zorro character always represented the honourable good against the evil-though-bumbling Mexican soldiers who controlled the pueblo in which he lived.”

Zorro, adds Culture Clash member Herbert Siguenza, “is a Hispanic myth. He’s less threatening that way. California had real bandidos defending the rights of native Californians, people like Joaquin Murieta. These guys were the real Zorros to us Latinos.”