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Ad Code: 4
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from Auction House Records.
Black Canary Pin-Up Illustration Original Art (1976).
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Alex Toth was my friend."
Who knows how many people, usually aspiring artists and writers, said
that about the guy who mailed them "kudos" for their work, along with
tips and trade secrets, often on the front and back (and sometimes the
stamp) of a 3" x 5" postcard - punctuated with his trademark duck
(often looking like road kill in recent years )?
Envelopes and real stamps were reserved for sending his valuable 6-inch
by 9-inch treasures - his doodles and sketches and artwork drawn with
black felt markers on thin Mead pad paper. Along with his fedora-clad
heroes, Toth had an old-fashioned 1940s way of talking - "skiddooisms",
as someone called them. We were all "kiddo," though was "tho," the
graphic business was "the biz" and his "company" was "SagaPix."
And he was never one to use one adjective when three or four would
suffice - usually separated with innumerable/many/countless/lots of
"/"s.
Alex Toth (rhymes with 'both') was a generous friend, an irascible
curmudgeon and one of the greatest graphic geniuses of the past sixty
years. He died at the age of 77 in May of 2006, and herewith is a
tribute to "our friend."
Alex claimed that it was his childhood love of newspaper comic strips
and "big foot" cartoonists that inspired him to become an artist.
Those childhood "funny papers" made an impression that he carried with
him forever. No matter what he did or where he went that
inspiration was never far behind, and he never lost that sense of
child-like adulation and wonder. Perhaps his favorite was Roy
Crane, creator of Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy and Buz Sawyer. In
2003 Alex was still praising Roy Crane as a model for comics artists.
In an illustrated article for his web site, tothfans.com, Toth wrote
"With a keen design sense always visible, his stories raced along - had
his own present-tense caption writing way - not a word wasted… he never
used texture marks! Nope! Took me lots of studying his art before
- finally - I noted their absence."
Born in 1928 (the same year as Frank Frazetta), he was 16 when his art
first appeared in a comic book. That book was Eastern Color Printing's
Heroic Comics #32, dated September of 1945. In that issue he drew
one illustration for a text story, "Yankee King," as well as a three
page war story of bravery in the Air Force entitled "One of Our Heroes
is ...Missing!"
A dozen two- to four-page stories for Eastern and a few other small
publishers, coupled with constant visits to the offices of the major
comic book publishers brought him eventually to DC in mid 1947.
There he did a dozen issues and covers featuring the superheroes Dr.
Midnight and The Green Lantern. These are over-fondly remembered
by fans today. Toth was learning his craft and it is only the superhero
nature of the stories (a genre he almost completely abandoned after
1948) that gives them a place of honor in the Toth canon.
He was initially hired by Shelly Mayer and credits Mayer with many of
the formative lessons he learned in the "biz." In a 1969
interview in Graphic Story Magazine, Alex says:
Shelly was the first and only really creative and knowledgeable comics
editor I've worked for in all these years in the field. He was
rough. He'd tear up my pages if I got too cute, too arty in telling the
story. He'd tear them up on the spot and tell me to go home and
do 'em over again. I tried to put in all the elements that I thought
were important. But they weren't important. And Shelly was the one who
pointed that out to me. He didn't care how pretty the pictures were if
they didn't develop the story. "Stop trying to be another
Michelangelo," he'd say, "and just tell the story. Just tell the
story." And every time I walked out of his office, I'd learned
something--whether I wanted to or not. The direction of action;
staging; the importance of dialogue flow, how it should run through a
page, panel by panel; what the eye should read first and what you want
the eye to see first.
But Mayer quit to devote himself to his art and Alex did much of his
early DC work for editor Sol Harrison. Harrison was a tough task
master who instilled in Toth the second part of his lifelong mantra:
"simplify, simplify, simplify." Shelly wanted him to "tell the
story: and Harrison insisted that Alex learn what to omit from his art.
"Wellll, Alex," Toth once quoted Sol Harrison as saying, "it's all
rrightt, but you still don't know what to leave out."
As the superhero comics faded, there were plenty of opportunities that
better suited the young artist who had, after all, been raised on the
adventure comic strips of the 1930s. In quick succession, he was
assigned Streak the Wonder Dog (in the final issues of Green Lantern),
Johnny Thunder (in All-American Western formerly All Star Comics),
Sierra Smith (in the new Dale Evans Comics), Jimmy Wakely (another
western character with his own title), Rex the Wonder Dog (in his own
title), Johnny Peril (in Sensation Mystery) various romance stories and
the amazing Danger Trail - to name a few.
All-American Western #103
November, 1948 All-American Western #111
Dec. 1949/Jan. 1950 All-American Western #121
Aug-Sept, 1951 The Adventures of Rex the Wonder Dog #2 - Mar. 1952
In the space of four years, Alex went from being "the new kid" to being
"THE new kid." Just look at the progression of covers above. His style
was crisp and clean and, most of all, clear and readable. He had
distilled the "essence" of the comic book adventure style from his
amalgam of influences and his constant struggle to see what he had to
leave out.
It's these adventure and western stories that impressed his peers and
spread the "gospel" of the Toth style. He was asked in 1950 to
"ghost" the newspaper adventure strip, Casey Ruggles. He moved to
San Jose California where the strip's artist, Warren Tufts,
lived. The move netted Alex a wife, but he soon returned to
Eastern environs until 1952 when he moved back to San Jose.
In early-1952, Alex left DC and began free-lancing. The impact of
his style was felt most strongly at Standard where he spent two
prolific years drawing stories and covers in every comic genre.
It is easily some of his best work - at least in my humble opinion. All
of the work in this two year span is memorable and powerful and
simplified. During these two years, he also drew stories for EC,
Lev Gleason, St. John and others. But at Standard, his style simply
dominated the company's titles. Strong, stylistic artists like
Nick Cardy, Mike Sekowsky, Ross Andru, John Celardo and others were
either instructed to draw like Alex or else were simply overwhelmed
with the "rightness" of the Toth style. At left is one of his
covers from November, 1952 on Standard's Fantastic Worlds #6, the
second of only three issues.
(note: Standard began each title with issue #5, probably to imply a
comic that was already well established. Atlas comics, at the same
time, didn't put the issue number on the cover until issue #5. But
Ziff-Davis topped them all by starting each title with issue #10. In
our current era of first issue "collector's items" these practices seem
hard to fathom, but back then comic books were for reading, not
collecting.)
Toth was drafted in 1954. Stationed in Japan, he created an
award-winning newspaper strip, Jon Fury. Writing the strip from week to
week was an unexpected pleasure for him. Despite the tiny size
(6"x9") and the primitive "Multigraph" printing, it represented the
first time he had complete control over a strip. And he reveled
in it. It would be a decade before he would have that type of freedom
artistically and 25 years before he would craft stories of a character
he created and owned.
When Alex returned from military duty in 1956, he moved to
Hollywood. Los Angeles was the headquarters of Western
Publishing, whose comic books were released under the Dell label. In
late 1956, Toth art began to appear as filler stories in several Dell
books. These three- to six-page stories demonstrated his ability
to tell a story and to hold a likeness and they quickly led to an
assignment to draw a comic book adaptation of the John Wayne film, The Wings of Eagles.
More TV and movie adaptations followed. For four years he drew adaptations of everything from films like The Land Unknown, to Disney films like Clint and Mac and Darby O'Gill and the Little People to The Lennon Sisters, and popular TV shows like The Real McCoys, Oh! Susanna, 77 Sunset Strip, The Danny Thomas Show and dozens more. In all he drew 30 issues of Dell's anthology title, Four Color Series.
The best remembered and the most famous of these were the seven issues
of Zorro that he drew between 1957 and 1959. The stories were adapted
from the Disney TV show (which was a franchise just as Indiana Jones
would be for a later generation). Sparks flew when Alex turned in
completed artwork wherein he'd edited and/or eliminated the excess
descriptive verbiage he found in the scripts. This was the result
of writers (and editors) not understanding the difference between a
script for a TV show and one for a comic book. In the former, the
writer explains what is going to be seen on the finished episode while
in the latter, the artist has already shown it. Often entire paragraphs
of captions were only repeating what the reader had already assimilated
from the art. The editor's response was "What do you know about
writing? You're just the artist." Alex, who has never been one to bear
fools gladly or any other way, responded by being "just the artist." He
turned in stories that were less than his best because they obviously
didn't want his best. Still, when he did do his best on Zorro, it was
spectacular.
from "Zorro's Secret Passage" in Four Color #882, Feb. 1958
Looking to expand his talents, Alex accepted an assignment in 1960 from
Cambria Studios to be the art director on a new animated TV cartoon
called Space Angel. He designed the characters (along with Warren
Tufts and Doug Wildey) and made it almost through the first season
(1962) before what can only be called "artistic differences" led him to
quit. It was back to the comics.
Except for a very few later and mostly forgotten stories, he left
Dell/Western in 1960. He went back to DC and did some nice work in the
early '60s in their mystery titles and on characters like Eclipso and
Rip Hunter: Time Master. At left is page 22 of Rip Hunter #6 (Jan-Feb,
1962) taken from the original art. Click the image for a larger scan.
He even tried his hand at Marvel with a best forgotten X-Men story
(over Jack Kirby layouts and inked by Vince Coletta!). By 1964 he was
ready to go back into animation, but he still wanted to do graphic
narratives. He still wanted to "tell the story." So he abandoned the
establishment of the comic books and went to work for mavericks on both
coasts.
For New York-based Warren Publishing, Alex produced ten short
masterpieces for Creepy, Blazing Combat, and Eerie. Working primarily
with writer/editor Archie Goodwin, whom he respected, he was given the
freedom to experiment with media and to tell the story as he chose.
On the west coast, it was the hot rod cartoon magazines of Pete Millar.
At Millar, for the first time since Jon Fury, Alex was writing his own
stories and drawing them exactly as he saw fit. The enthusiasm and
verve in his work for both of these companies is palpable.
In 1964 he joined Doug Wildey on Johnny Quest at Hanna-Barbera. He was soon working with character designs for Space Ghost, Herculoids,
and most of the other H-B animated series. For four years (where have
we heard THAT before?), he devoted most of his time there to drawing
model sheets - instructions to other artists on how to draw each
character. In 1996, Darrell McNeil and Alex published Alex Toth: By Design,
which collected nearly 350 of said model sheets. Unfortunately,
the visionary publishers were novice lawyers and failed to negotiate
the RIGHTS to publish all those characters (like Superman, Batman and
Wonder Woman, Sea Lab and Hot Wheels, Thunderbolts and The Herculoids,
Lost in Space and The Fantastic Four, etc.) The book was an
immediate sellout, and can never be reprinted. The last copy I saw on
eBay went for over $250.
"Creative Differences" led to a parting of the ways - Alex wanted to
tell stories and thought he knew how to do that, while the H-B folks
wanted to make nice, safe Saturday morning cartoons that would be just
like all the other nice, safe Saturday morning cartoons they had made
for the past four years. Alex came out ahead, though. He left H-B with
a new wife, Guyla, who was the light of his later life.
Alex jumped back into comic books with both feet. From 1969 to
1973 (what's that? Oh, yeah, about four years...) he drew new material
for DC including some elegant romance stories, powerful war stories,
and framing pages and stories for many of the mystery titles like The Witching Hour and Weird War Tales. Perhaps his masterpiece of this era were the five issues of Hot Wheels,
which culminated in his own story for issue number five, "The Case of
the Curious Classic." As well as being one heck of a great yarn,
this story is noteworthy on two fronts. The first is that Alex set
himself a rigid, eight-panels-per-page format (which he violated, quite
deliberately, only in the penultimate panel). When other writers would
use only three to six panels, Alex put you in front of a movie screen
and forced the action on you. If was VERY effective. The second
noteworthy aspect is that it was the last issue of Hot Wheels
illustrated by Alex. Neal Adams did the final issue number six. What
did a guy have to do to get some respect?.
As he continued to make a living illustrating the words and characters
of others, Alex began to craft a character of his own. It was to be Jesse Bravo,
an Errol Flynn-like adventurer whose 1930s adventures echoed the style
of the material Alex was raised on. For whatever reason, the mid-70s
creation did not see print until 1980 in issues three and four of a new
Warren magazine called The Rook. It was published 25 years after he had
created and drawn his own Jon Fury.
Then it was back to Warren Publishing for several excellent black and
white Creepy and Eerie stories like "Unreal" above, which he also
wrote. Occasional forays at Marvel and Red Circle (the
"adventure" brand of the Archie Comics publishers) and the alternative
comics publishers rounded out the 70s and early 80s.
The decade from 1974 to 1984 was rich in its art and
experimentation. The work was also sporadic and occasionally
perfunctory. In 1985, Guyla died after a lingering decade of
cancer and cancer treatment, and a lot of Alex died, too. He
withdrew into his West Hollywood home and built barriers around his
heart. He let people into both occasionally, but just as often
forced them out again. He was always a maverick and opinionated,
but now he became an unhappy maverick and an opinionated loner.
From here on, the "establishment" couldn't (or wouldn't - Alex had
burned a lot of bridges over the years) get him to draw for them, but
his fans and friends were deluged with page after page of those doodles
mentioned in the second paragraph. Here are just two of the dozens he
sent me over the years. There were few comic editors who could wrangle
an illustration out of him, but Mark Chiarello, an editor AND a fan,
got a cover out of him for Batman Black & White #4 in 1996.
Folks like Manuel Auad managed to work with him long enough to edit and
publish three books on his work. Dave Cook, who helped write this and
looked it over for accuracy, brought him into the computer age by
getting him involved in Jeff Rose's website, tothfans.com. Alberto
Becattini edited an issue of Glamour International in 1997 that
featured him. I sold him books and had long, joyous phone
conversations about art, comics and illustration. During these
last twenty years, Alex filled his days with cigarettes and doodles,
interacting with the world at his convenience and on his terms. A
drawing here and there would get published. His postcard thoughts and
ramblings appeared in Roy Thomas' Alter Ego for years.
At the end he moved into an assisted living home and quit the
cigarettes, but it was too little too late. He died at his drawing
board on May 27, 2006 amid sacks of mail from fans - some of whom
weren't even born when Alex quit the "biz." Despite not having drawn a
comics story in 20 years, Wizard Magazine, that icon of modernism, named him one of the top ten comic book artists of all time. The Comics Journal,
that bastion of exclusion, featured him on the cover in 2004 and
printed a 25-year-old interview with him as well as an extended
overview of his career and 36 pages of color comic story reprints. Yes,
his place in comics history is undeniable and deserved, but that's not
the most important thing.
"Alex Toth was my friend." And as I type this the tears keep streaming down my cheeks. Damn, I miss him..
Find out more about Alex Toth from the following books:
The Comics Journal #262 Klaus Strzyz/Bob Levin, 2004 Fantagraphics Books
Toth "One for the Road" Manuel Auad, 2000 Auad Publishing
Toth Black & White Manuel Auad, 1999 Auad Publishing
Alex Toth: By Design Alex Toth/Darrell McNeil, 1996 SagaPix/Gold Medal Productions
Alex Toth Manuel Auad, 1995 Kitchen Sink Press
The Alex Toth Index Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr., 1987
The Art of Alex Toth 1977 Feature Associates
Graphic Story Magazine #10 Interview with Alex Toth - Bill Spicer, 1969
Source:
The Vadeboncoeur Collection of Knowledge
Illustrations copyright by their respective owners.
This page written & © 2006 by Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr., who has give permission for its use here.
http://www.bpib.com/illustra3/Toth/toth.html
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