Genius, Isolated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth [Hardcover]
Dean Mullaney (Author), Bruce Canwell (Author)
Product Details:
* Hardcover: 328 pages
* Publisher: IDW Publishing (May 10, 2011)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 1600108288
* ISBN-13: 978-1600108280
* Product Dimensions: 13.2 x 9.6 x 1.5 inches
Roy Rogers: The Collected Daily and Sunday Newspaper Strips [Hardcover]*
* NOTE: As mentioned in the forums, Alex ghosted on this strip for less than a month (12-19-1960 to 1-12-1961). So this book may be for the Toth completists only..
In an example of Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell's dedication and hard work, the awaited biography of Alex Toth will be presented in three volumes starting in March 2011.
In an email back in October, Dean Mullaney reported that "Bruce Canwell's bio text is already over 30,000 words and he still has a little ways to go!"
Also thanks to cooperation of Fans, Lorraine Turner (Associate Art Director) and the Toth Family, this series of volumes will be filled with detail and art from Alex Toth that will likely never be surpassed.
Fear and suspense can be effectively created by the inference of the unknown. What is shown can be less harrowing than what is implied and then forms in the imagination of the reader. The late cartoonist Alexander Toth disliked drawing explicit horror and violence in the style of E.C., what he called “gore-gulping grind and grunge.” His preferred taste was for adventure fare appropriate for general audiences. However, throughout his career as an interpretive comic artist, he worked mainly on short stories for anthology titles and so he drew many horror stories. The artists of Toth’s generation drew comics primarily for children. When called upon to actually show ghouls and demons, he most often made them as flimsy as the harmless monsters he designed for children’s TV cartoons. Still, Toth is one of the greatest of America’s horror comics stylists because he believably renders the emotions of characters who face shadowy, barely-seen terrors."
With my new post of Toth's primer on TV Animation 'TV Cartoons', I thought I would look for a few Toth cartoons online tonight.
There is no shortage of them on Youtube, etc. A few 'Space Ghost And Dino Boy' Cartoons are online @ theWB.com. So I thought I would start there. Unfortunately, the plots on these cartoon are non-existent, dull and the designs have been watered down by nameless animators, but the clever Toth character, creature and other designs can still be sussed out. The plots fall so far from the high-water mark that Hanna-Barbera achieved with Jonny Quest that it is really sad. You can see why Toth got frustrated with the industry.
But HB shows like these clearly stood out to many of us as children. I have heard from modern animators that these shows were monumental influences that they have brought into modern cartoons. So if you have a few minutes see if you can spot Toth’s vision.
collectingfool Most recent comment made on Sat, Aug 9 - 21:46 CDT:
Well, I've scanned a page here or there to email to someone for reference but scanning the whole book would probably destroy the book binding. The way the book is put together to be able to get really good scans of every image you'd completely wreck the binding. Besides, that's a hell of a lot of scans and a website that would put all those images up would probably run into the same problem the original publisher had in the first place, a cease and desist order from H&B and probably DC as
bentonjew Most recent comment made on Sun, Jul 20 - 21:43 CDT:
Great Creepy pages. Interesting combo of the two artists. Leo did incredible work for Warren. I wish his work had caught on more here in the states. He did some freelance storyboarding at ILM, then later did work for Guillermo Del Toro on the first Hellboy movie. A very kind, softspoken old gentleman. Last I'd heard, he'd left L.A. and moved back to Europe. There was one incredible period piece he did for Eerie about two vampire twins. Great stuff! The work here Toth certainly made his
Alec_Stevens Discussion posted on Thu, Jul 17 - 15:56 CDT:
A new graphic novel, published under my own Calvary Comics imprint, is now available. Its full title is Erlo Stegen and the REVIVAL AMONG THE ZULUS, and an online preview can be seen here:
bentonjew Most recent comment made on Thu, Jun 19 - 10:38 CDT:
It's nice that someone besides myself has contributed to the Roy Rogers collection ( thanks Wally Harrington! ) I spent some time scouring microfilms
at the Los Angeles Public Library trying to find a newspaper at the time that even carried the Roy Rogers strip. I wish there were a way to find out what newspapers carried which strips during that era. Ever try to speed scan with those old microfilm machines? I made myself nauseous! I found out that Roy Rogers lived in Riverside county at
