Alex Toth « The Hooded Utilitarian

Clarity and Intent

Short reviews of recent comics by Toth, Steranko, Swarte, Jodorowsky/Moebius, Brown and Tomine.

November 27, 2011
By James Romberger
Article, Featured
7 comments

Genius, Clarified

A review of “Setting the Standard”, Greg Sadowski and Fantagraphics’ complete collection of Alex Toth’s influential 1950s work for Standard Comics.

Genius, Disempowered

IDW’s first volume of their Alex Toth biography is visually gorgeous, but the text supports misconceptions about Toth and about the role of the artist in comics.

January 10, 2011
By James Romberger
Article
23 comments

by James Romberger Since I am precisely the type of brutally obsessive yet overly sensitive observer that qualifies me to write for The Hooded Utilitarian, I am unable to ignore a few references I have seen online to my “fannish adoration” of the work of genius cartoonist Alex Toth. Answering them also gives me the [...]

December 1, 2010
By James Romberger
Article
33 comments

Toth vs. Kubert

by James Romberger In “Man of Rock,” Bill Schelly’s recent biography of Joe Kubert, the well-respected graphic novelist and former DC editor says that he and Alex Toth knew each other well from “way, way back” in the 1940s when they were teenaged cartoonists. Kubert is two years older than Toth, which may have seemed [...]

November 8, 2010
By James Romberger
Article
8 comments

Cursing the Darkness: The Last Horrors of Alex Toth

by James Romberger 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 [...]

September 17, 2010
By Noah Berlatsky
Blog
53 comments

Too Much Toth

During our ominously metastasizing roundtable on R. Crumb’s Genesis, one of the big questions that kept coming up was about whether you should compare comics to other things. Is it fair to set comics next to your meatloaf and say, “You know — comics. Not so tasty”? Is it okay to put them on the [...]