Ah, Alex Toth. I'm sure I first encountered Toth's work long before I knew the name, from his TV animation work, in particular the 1970s Super Friends series that I know I watched. The first comic I can recall seeing his work in was the 1983 SUPERMAN ANNUAL #9, featuring a team-up of Superman and Batman against Lex Luthor. Apparently the story was done for some foreign publisher originally, and showed up in the annual. Anyway, a real eye-opening story. The main Superman and Batman comics of the time hewed very close to a house style that was a combination of Curt Swan and Neal Adams, a style I did like then and still like now. This story was one of the first non-reprint stories I saw that veered sharply away from style, in ways almost counter to it. I liked what I saw, in part because one of the strengths Toth has is an ability to get down the essence of a character, and while he didn't draw Superman like Swan or Batman like Adams, you could see what made the character work in his art, and that makes you appreciate both his work and those of other artists.
Still a lovely story, by the way, and I don't think it's ever been reprinted. A shame.
Kept encountering his work sporadically over the next decade, and hearing more about him as well. His work was invariably a highlight of whatever reprint collection it would be included in, and he seemed like an interesting guy. Anyway, it wasn't long before I was specifically seeking out his work.
So much interesting stuff. He worked with a lot of interesting people over the years, always doing a good job of realizing their scripts to the fullest potential. Robert Kanigher was a frequent writer for him back in the 1950s, and they re-teamed for a few stories in the 1970s that were highlights in the careers of both men. "Soldier's Grave" is perhaps the most remarkable of those stories, pretty close to perfect as it tells the story of a poor old Egyptian man who joins the army in order to feed his family.
Also of note among their stories in that era are "The Tally", "The Glory Boys", "White Devil... Yellow Devil" and "the Mask of the Red Fox". Special stories all, and "White Devil" in particular is like a little lesson in storytelling.
Among Toth's mentors in comics was Sheldon Mayer, one of my favourite comic book creators. He would frequently mention in his letter/essays some aspects of Mayer's involvement in his early days, the very tough but invariably useful advice and criticism, always with a great deal of affection. Mayer and Toth would work on two stories together in the mid-1970s. "Is a Snerl Human?" is one of my favourite short stories ever, an oddly affecting parable. "Who Is Haunting the Haunted Chateau?" is a nice little war/ghost story, with some clever little bits of storytelling.
Toth had a few interesting collaborations with Archie Goodwin. A few stories for Warren back in the 1960s, I especially liked the two in BLAZING COMBAT, "Lone Hawk" and "Survival". They did a few more for DC in the 1970s, both returning to the aviation theme, with a Batman story "Death Flies the Haunted Sky" and "Burma Sky", which I've seen on more than one list of the greatest comics of all time, and I'm not disagreeing.
So much more worth mentioning. He only did a handful of stories for Kurtzman's war comics at EC, but those are interesting. I briefly talk about one
here. His Zorro comics are a lot of fun, and the
still-in-print Image edition of them is one of the best $13 you'll ever spend if you don't have a copy yet. BRAVO FOR ADVENTURE, of course, that's some interesting stuff, and proof he had some writing chops as well. He did a lot of unfortunately unreprinted work in the 1950s, pick up some of Eclipse's SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT books of the 1980s for a taste. A lot of covers and pin-ups over the years, almost always a highlight of whatever project they appeared in. There's HOT WHEELS, now there's a book that was much better than it had any right to be thanks to Toth. And that's only scratching the surface.
I think I'll probably go on a bit of a Toth kick for the next week or so, posting various pages that leap out at me while re-reading some stories. Of course, you don't have to wait for me, go over
here and look around.
DORK #11
USAGI YOJIMBO #96
THE ENEMY ACE ARCHIVES VOL. 2
KICKBACK Hardcover
CHARLTON SPOTLIGHT MAGAZINE #5 FALL 2006
PHOENIX VOLUME 8 TP
GUMBY #2
DEAR JOHN: THE ALEX TOTH DOODLE BOOK
BATTLER BRITTON #2 (OF 5)
THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF THE DEPARTURE OF MISS FINCH hardcover
SHOWCASE PRESENTS: BATMAN VOL. 1
I just finished reading the new editions of Keiji Nakazawa's BAREFOOT GEN (HADASHI NO GEN) published by Last Gasp. That ending still chokes me up every time, and still stands as one of the biggest emotional punches I've ever read in a comic book. The books should be fairly common in libraries right now, so I highly recommend you see if your local system has a set if you've never read the series before.
LIFE AND TIMES OF SCROOGE MCDUCK COMPANION.jpg)
Time Bandits #1 [1982]
The adaptation is only 48 pages, and a lot of the charm of the movie is in Terry Gilliam's insane visuals and the quirky actors (David Warner as Evil always cracks me up), so the book would probably read a little jumpy to someone unfamiliar with the movie, but for those who have seen the movie it serves as a nice cheap summary of the story, the key scenes, the best bits of dialogue and the visuals, especially from those days when home video wasn't so common. Parkhouse (who I'm mostly familiar with as an artist on such things as the BoJeffries Saga) does a good job of picking out the key bits to include and compressing them, and Lloyd and Stokes do a good job of staying within their styles but still evoking the key visuals. It fails a bit in the more spectacular visual scenes, which I attribute to a lack of space. The giant who carries the boat on his head is relegated to two pages of seven panels each. I'm sure if they had twice as many pages they could have done a splash page of him that would have had the same effect as his scene in the movie. As it is there's only one splash page in the whole book, oddly enough the opening page showing a suburban neighbourhood.
Suicide Squad [1987 series]
