MAY 29, 2006
ALEX TOTH HAS DIED
Toth's son Eric reported that his father died at his drawing table. He was 77.
Alex Toth and what only comics can do
The first time I saw Alex Toth's work it took me by surprise. It was the 1974 Detective Comics #442 "Death Flies the Haunted Sky." This was during Archie Goodwin's run as the editor and writer for DC's Batman title that was hurting for sales. At the time, I was 10 years old and I was used to Jim Aparo and Neal Adam's artwork for Batman, which is, needless to say, different from Toth's.
Reading the lead story by Toth, for a few pages I was disappointed because the "look" was somewhat old-fashioned (as far as my Aparo-influenced conception of how Batman looked) and the way the panels told the story was strange ... but at the top of page four, where the empty hole at the top of the water tower shows Batman climbing out of it in a "time lapse" four panel progression, I was excited, and then I realized Toth had also pulled another "time trick" on page three, showing multiple Batman figures in a single panel as he plunges through the roof of the tower.
My excitement was because Toth had made the fiction of the tale become real for me; he had engineered a way to impress me with a sense of velocity, space and physicality of the characters motions... and he did it through a clever diagram showing weight, speed and its effect. Only comics can do this as a way of telling a story. An adventure movie cannot suddenly stop and become a science documentary on laws of physics, and a literary effort must describe through words the entire visual panorama without resorting to a line drawing to show the event. But a comic can do all of this and all at the same time without the story breaking apart into mismatched pieces. Toth did all of this while telling a relatively simple detective story (Goodwin's stories emphasized the deduction ability of Batman, often a complete tale in only 11 or 12 page stories.)
Draftsmanship and story telling
I did not have any definition for what I was seeing on the those pages in 1974, but now I know it was a perfectly modeled world using draftsmanship and story telling skills to make the story come alive in my ten year old brain.
Besides the expert drawing the World War I era biplane that figures in a particular way in Goodwin's story, there are numerous interior room drawings and buildings that show Toth's ability to imagine a real world and picture it on paper. I also learned to be impressed with the effortless looking, simply drawn anatomical skills Toth possessed, such as the image of a leaping Batman on page 9. Toth indicates the rib cage and the spread of the muscles of the body simply but effectively, all showing Batman's desperate reaching to bridge the space between he and the biplane.
That panel doesn't show an "action pose" but an "action move" and the difference is that the eye gets to look at the muscular figure, but it is in a motion and in a "pose" that is part of the story and expresses the action occurring so that we can understand it, or even feel it if we're involved enough with the story.
Much too often in superhero comics the action "pose" of the hero actually has nothing to do with the story but is an extraneous expression of some sense of the character that transcends the tale. It's not a part of the story but of the marketing of the attitude of the character, a sudden stop to advertise. In an involving, well-written story this sudden "stop" breaks the progression of the story and pulls the reader toward focus on extraneous things. Toth's approach is to display all the cavorting and anatomical display a superhero fan loves, but only fashioned as an expression of the story. With Toth we get to have our cake and eat it, too.
Toth favorites
A year after reading the "Death Flies The Haunted Sky" comic, I found a used copy of the 1972 Toth story "White Devil, Yellow Devil," which ran in Star Spangled War Stories # 164.
I read all of the DC Comics "war" comics at that time, and Toth's quiet, dangerous world where his drawings could project the sound (and lack of sound) with visual story-telling was vastly different from the usual bombast in the genre. The (mostly quiet) emotions of the characters in Kanigher's tale are carried forward into visual definition by Toth's drawings, not by just text queues, which is the usual way, but in panel after panel where their is no text at all. (My appreciation for this story, and how Kanigher and Toth handled it, is in my essay at art & artifice.)
Two other Toth tales which effected me is the often reprinted Burma Sky (you can read it with Toth's notes at tothfans.com) and the Crucifixion tale This Dirty Job (can be read online at toth fans - - with some of Alex Toth's notes about the story - - or at dialbforblog.com).
For "Dirty Job" Toth has a bloody Roman sword as part of the story logo dribbling into the wine glass of the Roman soldier in the bottom panel. At Toth fans one can read his remarks repudiating the gimmick, but for me at the time I read it, it was effective and startling. Typological symbols like that fired my teenage brain.
- The Comics Reader has an extensive list of links for Toth related news and information.
- Newsarama is carries a news item on the story too.
- Toth-fans.com has much more information on Toth.
The news reports say that Toth died at his drawing table. He was a week shy of his 78th birthday.
Alex Toth page from Blazing Combat, 1966
1972 page from Toth's White Devil, Yellow Devil
Darby O'GIll page by Alex Toth
Read an essay about Alex Toth's work on "White Devil... Yellow Devil" at Art & Artifice
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