Alex Toth

Space Ghost, one of Toth's most famous designs.

Alex Toth (June 25, 1928 – May 27, 2006), pronounced with a long "o", was a professional cartoonist. He began his career in comic strips and comic books but is best known for his animation designs for Hanna-Barbera throughout the 1960s and 1970s. His work included Super Friends, Jonny Quest, Space Ghost and Birdman. Toth's work has been resurrected in the late-night, adult-themed spinoffs on Cartoon Network: Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, Sealab 2021 and Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law.

Toth launched his career at the age of 15, as a generation of illustrators went to war. Initially wishing to draw a newspaper strip ("it was my dream to do what Caniff, Raymond, and Foster had done" [1]), he found the industry "dying" and instead moved into comic books, first employed by Steve Douglas on Famous Funnies. He served in the US Army from 1954-1956 and drew a weekly adventure strip called "Jon Fury" while stationed in Japan. His work at Hanna-Barbara from 1965-1982 included storyboards as well as designs for hundreds of characters, props, settings, and effects.

Toth's contributions to the comics medium are not widely known among casual fans. He did much of his comics work outside the current mainstream of superhero comics, concentrating instead on such subjects as hot rod racing, romance, horror, and action-adventure. His stint on Disney's Zorro is highly regarded and has been reprinted in trade paperback form several times and there are two volumes of "The Alex Toth Reader" published by Pure Imagination wich focuses on his work for Standard and Western publishing, but otherwise the bulk of his shorter stories can be difficult to locate. Nonetheless, he is widely regarded as an "artist's artist" and is often lumped among such greats as Will Eisner and Jack Kirby as one of the undisputed masters of the sequential storytelling medium.

Journalist Tom Spurgeon wrote that Toth possessed "an almost transcendent understanding of the power of art as a visual story component," and called him "one of the handful of people who could seriously enter into Greatest Comic Book Artist of All-Time discussions" and "a giant of 20th Century cartoon design." [2] He was formally inducted into the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1990.

Toth was known for his exhaustive study of other artists and his outspoken analysis of comic art past and present. For example, in a 2001 interview he criticized the trend of fully-painted comics, saying "It could be comics if those who know how to paint also knew how to tell a story! Who knew what pacing was, and didn't just jam a lot of pretty pictures together into a page, pages, and call it a story, continuity! It ain't!" [3]. In general, Toth lamented what he saw as a lack of awareness on the part of younger artists of their predecessors, as well as a feeling that the innocent fun of comics' past was being lost in the pursuit of pointless nihilism and "mature content". [4]

In the past few years he contributed to the magazines "Comic Book Artist" and "Alter Ego" writing columns titled "Before I forget" and "Who cares? I do!" respectively. A book titled "Dear John: The Alex Toth Doodle Book" features his correspondence with John Hitchcock and is published by Octupus Press.

Toth died at his drawing table on May 27, 2006. [5] The following week, Adult Swim devoted bumps to Toth which simply read "Alex Toth 1928-2006". The words then faded out and the [adult swim] logo was not shown, a style the network only uses when mourning the passing of one they deem to be an important person.

External links

• Official Alex Toth website
• Alex Toth at IMDb
• Online eulogy from Tom Spurgeon's The Comics Reporter featuring numerous quotations, images, and links
• incomplete index of comic-book work at the Grand Comic-Book Database
• "Comic artist Alex Toth dies at 77", BBC News, 5 June 2006
• Obituary in The Guardian, June 23, 2006