Tag Archives: Alex Toth

Reverse-Engineering Fairbanks

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Silent film star Douglas Fairbanks (1883-1939) was hugely popular in his time. He was one of the first performers of whom it could be said that he was less an actor than a star who was considered to be “playing himself.” He was so universally recognized and his audiences’ expectations were so great that in his films, his actual name would come up on the intertitles as he was introduced onscreen. The first part of his career was spent making vigorous comedies full of antic chase scenes, such as His Picture in the Papers, Manhattan Madness and His Majesty, the American, all of which blended his facility for comedic timing with great acrobatic skills. He became the quintessential boys’ hero.

United Artists: Chaplin, Pickford and Fairbanks

United Artists: Chaplin, Pickford and Fairbanks

By the time of his formation of United Artists with the even more popular stars, his wife Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, Fairbanks had come to retain considerable control over his movies. He produced, wrote and starred in his own films and was in a position to select his casts and crews from the best talents Hollywood had to offer. With his 30th film, The Mark of Zorro, he initiated the action genre in film. Thereafter, he dedicated the remainder of his career to the costumed adventure genre. He set a source precedent for all of the action stars to follow such as Errol Flynn, Burt Lancaster and the nameless protagonist of the My Name is Nobody spaghetti westerns, as well as even the semi-humorous performances of musical star Gene Kelly—and influencing contemporary stars of action/comedy like Jackie Chan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Johnny Depp and “The Rock.”

Fairbanks’ 1920 silent feature film version of The Mark of Zorro derived from the prose serial adventure “The Curse of Capistrano” by Johnston McCulley that ran in six parts in the pulp periodical All-Story Weekly in 1919. Fairbanks’ son Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in his autobiography says that McCulley’s story was brought to his father’s attention by agent Ruth Allen, who was a friend of Anna Sully, his mother and Fairbanks’ first wife. Fairbanks initially was reluctant to diverge from his modernist comedic image to do a period piece, but eventually he was convinced and procured the option. The resulting film became so popular that it determined the trajectory of his future career:

(The Mark of Zorro was) by far the most successful movie he ever made…a more than minor classic of its kind, widely imitated and remade…the phenomenal success of Zorro convinced my father from there on to take more time and concentrate on producing a series of high-quality, expensive films that would be exhibited first for long runs in regular theaters (not movie houses) with reserved hard-ticket seats (Fairbanks Jr. 64).

The exclusivity implied in this type of limited engagement and the increasingly impressive budgets Fairbanks commanded for his productions served to elevate the formerly crass medium of movies into something more resembling an art form. Although, a factor in Fairbanks’ decision to make The Mark of Zorro was a consideration of economy: the events of the film, set in Spanish California at the end of the previous century, were placed in the same location as Fairbanks’ studio in the southern part of the state, which was tremendously convenient and served to keep costs down.

The Mark of Zorro was directed by Fred Niblo, who would also helm Fairbanks’ next adventure film The Three Musketeers, but as was typical for the star, he wrote the film scenario and took a firm hand in all aspects of the production. In his auteuristic capacity, Fairbanks took the initiative to deviate from his pulp source and alter certain story points to telling affect. Significantly, he added several tropes to the original source story that would be credited as the inspiration for Batman and other popular cultural vigilante heroes.

However, while Fairbanks’ Zorro is certainly one of the prototypes for the dark masked hero with a ubiquitous identifying symbol intended to strike fear into the hearts of evildoers (i.e. Zorro’s slashed “Z,” Batman’s “bat signal” and The Phantom’s skull ring, which leaves its impression on the chins of the villains he punches), the earliest precedent for the swordsman vigilante with a symbol and a “foppish” alter ego is Baroness Emma Orczy’s the Scarlet Pimpernel, a hero of adventures set in the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution. The Pimpernel’s other identity is Sir Percy Blakeney and at the scenes of his escapades, he’d leave a calling card on which was printed an image of the flower of his namesake. The character first appeared in book form in 1905 and the character debuted in Hollywood as early as 1917, when a silent feature directed by Richard Stanton and starring Dustin Farnum was released by the Fox Film Corporation.

It would seem that Fairbanks took inspiration from the Pimpernel to add the “Z” symbol and to emphasize Zorro’s “effeminate” plainclothes disguise, Don Diego de la Vega. Actually, Don Diego is not Zorro’s true identity, but another smokescreen for a hero who has two false faces. This has been counted as Fairbanks’ innovation by his biographer Jeffrey Vance: “Fairbanks’ exploration of the different natures of masculinity is a source of continuing comment…The Mark of Zorro’s juxtaposition of the effete Don Diego and the vigorous Senor Zorro is the most distinctive delineation…both identities are masks. Don Diego Vega is neither fop nor fox.”

Comics scholar Charles Hatfield concurs and further says that the dual deception of Zorro enables the hero to navigate “an ironic class mobility à la so many versions of Robin Hood” and displays a bending of gender expectations to denote a “masculinity…made triumphant, queerly enough, through flamboyance” (Hatfield 113). These descriptions run very much along the lines of Batman’s alter-ego, Bruce Wayne, who lives in a mansion with only his butler Alfred and his teenaged ward Dick Grayson, an arrangement that was decried as “like a wish dream of…homosexuals living together” by psychiatrist Frederick Wertham in his 1954 expose of supposedly degenerate comics, Seduction of the Innocent, which raised such a controversy that public sentiment turned against the comics medium and a congressional inquiry subsequently served to drive many publishers out of business (cited in Williams, 4).

Hatfield’s sources include an essay by Catherine Williams that takes the gendering questions that arise from considering these depictions much further. Concentrating on the Tyrone Power remake of The Mark of Zorro but making observations that are also applicable to Fairbanks’ original and his prose source as well, Williams first explicates the phallic symbolism of the ubiquitous swordplay of the Zorro films, then offers:

Zorro fights for the aristocracy without their support and, while becoming a folk hero of sorts for the peons, does little to improve their constrained circumstances. It cannot be mere coincidence that Zorro, the flamboyant guerrilla who is outside all political systems, has as his alter ego an openly gay man, an outlaw of sorts himself” (Williams 13).

Williams claims that such closeted homosexuality is deliberately used by the powers that be, which then begins to cross over into the non-fictional real world: “(Zorro) isn’t really about a revolution led by a gay man to alleviate the suffering of the poor. Diego/Zorro’s mission, it turns out, is about preserving the line of succession, about maintaining the system’s power to ‘reproduce’ itself” (13).

With the long-standing, long-accepted “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies of the American military, Williams asserts, “one can ‘be’ gay as long as one does not pursue gay sex or inform the military of one’s orientation” (14). For superheroes and homosocial institutions such as the military alike,

(They) must forego sexual relations in the line of duty while manufacturing a deliberately misleading persona. Thus their ability to serve as warriors is a direct result of a “secret” or closeted identity. What is most terrifying about this link between popular culture and government policy is the way the closet is reinforced as a ‘noble’ or ‘heroic’ institution—something that should be done for the good of the country (Williams 14).

Williams thusly links the closeted identities of fictional vigilante and superheroes to the agendas of the very real military-industrial complex, an enveloping conspiracy if ever there was one.

But, regardless of these implications and perhaps in ignorance of the earlier Scarlet Pimpernel, Batman’s creators credit Fairbanks and his Diego/Zorro as an influence. Bob Kane co-created the character in 1939 with writer Bill Finger, who said, “My idea was to have Batman be a combination of Douglas Fairbanks, Sherlock Holmes, The Shadow and Doc Savage as well” (Steranko, 44). The creators of Superman, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, also claimed Fairbanks as a prime influence on their character, whose early appearance often depicted him in the star’s signature hands-on-hips stance.

In fact, Fairbanks’ amendments to Zorro’s character were also assimilated by author McCulley for his subsequent sequels. Such Fairbanks-initiated devices as Zorro’s slashed “Z” symbol and Diego’s ineffectual “handkerchief illusion”, prefaced by the character saying “Have you seen this one?” turned up in McCulley’s follow-up story in the now-renamed Argosy All-Story Weekly, “the Further Adventures of Zoro” (sic) which as I found, thanks to HU contributor Alex Buchet, was deceptively cover-subtitled with “In which Douglas Fairbanks will again play the Hero” :

Left: cover of All-Story Weekly, 1919. Right: cover of Argosy All-Story Weekly, 1922.

Left: cover of All-Story Weekly, 1919.
Right: cover of Argosy All-Story Weekly, 1922.

Fairbanks did not subsequently adapt that story for his own Zorro sequel, the 1925 Don Q, Son of Zorro— but rather, he appropriated some of its elements for another film property entirely, The Black Pirate. According to Fairbanks scholars John C. Tibbetts and James M. Walsh,

Similarities between McCulley’s sequel and the Fairbanks pirate film include scenes wherein the heroine is captured by a pirate ship, the hero scampering about the rigging of a pirate ship, a rescue affected by allies of the hero in a pursuing ship. Even the character of Barbados is echoed somewhat by Donald Crisp’s portrayal of a tough old pirate with a heart of gold. (Tibbetts & Walsh 124).

David A. Cook cites Fairbanks as the originator of the adventure spectacle, whose “star personality so influenced the character of his films that he deserves to be called an auteur”, who embodied the “all-American boy—boisterous, optimistic and athletic—who detested weakness, insincerity, and social regimentation in any form” (Cook 222). Additionally, Cook and other film scholars rank Fairbanks among the earliest champions of experimental film color for his use of the expensive two-color “cemented positive” Technicolor process for The Black Pirate.

It can’t be overstated just how profoundly Fairbanks set the heroic standard of his time. The star kept himself in extremely good physical condition—apart, that is, from his heavy smoking habit. He was famous for doing his own stunt work and a great part of his preparations for his films was dedicated to making his onscreen physical feats viable. For The Mark of Zorro, he engaged the assistance of stuntman Richard Talmadge. According to Vance,

In rehearsals, Talmadge mainly served as a model; Fairbanks, along with his trainer, Lewis Hippe, watched him go through the action in order to eliminate flaws and minimize hazards. Once a stunt routine was effectively refined to Fairbanks’ satisfaction, the star himself executed the feat for the cameras. (…) Invaluable expertise was also provided by a Belgian fencing master, Henry J. Uyttenhove…who choreographed all of the film’s dueling sequences (Vance 96).

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. corroborates his father’s stunt-training methodology with an account of the star’s preparation for Don Q:

One of the principle gimmicks of this Zorro sequel was the expert cracking of a giant Australian bullwhip. In order to learn how to do tricks with the monster lash, Dad had sent for the famous Australian athlete and bullwhip expert Snowy Baker. It didn’t take long before Dad was able to whirl the long blacksnake, make it crack like a pistol shot, and then snap a cigarette out of a brave and steady mouth fifteen or more feet away (Fairbanks Jr. 104).

In this way, Fairbanks used experts to give his stunts a feel of authenticity and won his audience over by displaying what seemed to be incredible feats of physical strength and stamina, in much the same manner as did the earliest incarnations of the “cinema of attractions.”

Fairbanks’ subsequent films were all action/adventures with his trademark comedic touch. One of the greatest is certainly The Thief of Bagdad. Fairbanks’ performance in this film is astounding; he seems more like a dancer than an actor as he moves in fluid choreography through sets which are built on a huge, vaulting scale, nearly dwarfing the performers. The climactic scene where Fairbanks attacks a city with a massive magical army that appears in puffs of smoke reminds me of nothing so much as director George Lucas’ first sequel to the Star Wars trilogy, The Phantom Menace. It is strange to think that in 1999 I waited with my son in line for hours to see what I recall mostly as a screen filled with legions of digitally created, exponentially replicated clone warriors that hardly look any more convincing than what Fairbanks was able to create onscreen in 1924.

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(Note: as with my other HU posts about film, this is a revised version of an essay originally done as a final paper for a recent class. In this case, I accepted my professor’s challenge to write about Fairbanks and to that end, I proposed to “reverse-engineer” a storyboard for one of the star’s  silent films.)

For the preparation of the storyboards that follow, I studied the narrative techniques of storyboard artist and legendary cartoonist Alexander Toth. It is coincidental that Toth is not only one of the most exemplary storyboard artists, but also an artist whose career is inextricably linked with the character of Zorro. In fact, Toth’s most famous comic books are his adaptations of the late 1950s, early 1960s Disney TV version of Zorro starring Guy Williams—and those are among the most refined products of the best-selling and family friendly but often relatively bland Dell imprint:

Alex Toth, “Zorro: Garcia’s Secret,” Four Color Comics #933, 1958

Alex Toth, “Zorro: Garcia’s Secret,” Four Color Comics #933, 1958

In his introduction to the reprint collection of his classic Zorro series, Toth wrote, “Fairbanks…created the visual film persona for all later renditions of Zorro to imitate.” However, Toth claimed to prefer the 1940 remake of The Mark of Zorro, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Tyrone Power. Of Fairbanks’ original The Mark of Zorro, Toth recalled, “I did see this silent classic at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art film seminar series in the 1940s and enjoyed its zesty, witty gymnastics, but the film’s dated style pales in contrast to Mamoulian’s ageless 1940 epic” (Toth 11). Despite this disclaimer, Toth’s Dell comics depictions of Zorro often echo the feel of Fairbanks’ version of the characters and settings equally as much as Powers’ update.

The storyboard is my fabrication to make a point. Fairbanks was unusual in that he not only produced and starred in his own films and did his own stunt work, but he wrote them as well. Though almost all films did eventually came to be done from scripts, in actuality the early silent films were rarely if ever scripted. Fairbanks was known to work from a relatively loose scenario, which left a good amount of leeway for improvisation in the filmmaking process. His films and indeed, all silent films were likely never storyboarded.

Storyboards first were used by the Walt Disney studio for a 1933 short, Three Little Pigs—and the first live action feature to be entirely storyboarded was the 1939 Gone with the Wind. But, Fairbanks is the founder of the action film, a genre that at the present time provides the bulk of storyboard artists’ employment, as action sequences are where their skills are most needed and in the most demand. And so, in order to study how Fairbanks articulated his action scenes, I undertook to make a storyboard for a six minute sequence in The Mark of Zorro. I did not have access to Fairbank’s script, or the source story he adapted his script from, so I watched the sequence in question once and as I did, I lightly sketched a bare-bones layout with action notations, which came out to 13 six-paneled pages. To render this, I then didn’t look further at the film, but wholly reconstructed the images from memory and in many cases simply invented the poses.

The result echoes my previous experience with storyboards, which is that the finished film looks quite a lot like what is drawn, but not exactly—a lot of detail and much greater precision of choreography in how sequences actually play out are developed in the process of filming. The storyboard is not intended to be particularly pretty; it looks and is a bit rushed—it is meant to provide a template, a starting point to guide the filmmakers; and that is what my storyboard looks like, to the best of my abilities within the time constraints I had to deal with, which also reflect the abbreviated schedules that many film productions labor under.

 

Click on images to enlarge:

Zorro 1

Zorro 2
Zorro 3
Zorro 4
Zorro 5
Zorro 6
Zorro 7
Zorro 8
Zorro 9
Zorro 10
Zorro 11
Zorro 12
Zorro 13

Thanks to Professor Marc Bolan and Marguerite Van Cook.
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Sources

The Black Pirate. Dir. Albert Parker. Perf. Douglas Fairbanks, Billie Dove. United Artists, 1926. Web. 06 Dec. 2013. Link

The Mark of Zorro. Dir. Fred Niblo. Perf. Douglas Fairbanks, Marguerite De La Motte, Noah Beery. United Artists, 1920. Web. 06 Dec. 2013.
Entire film: Link
Storyboarded scene: Link

The Thief of Bagdad. Dir. Raoul Walsh. Perf. Douglas Fairbanks, Julanne Johnston, Anna May Wong. United Artists, 1924. DVD, Kino Video, 2004.

Basinger, Jeanine. Silent Stars. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Print.

Buchet, Alex. “Prehistory of the Superhero (Part 6): The Fabulous Junkshop.” Hooded Utilitarian, October 24, 2013. Web. 09 Dec. 2013. Link

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. 3rd Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1996.
Print.

Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas. The Salad Days. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.

Hatfield, Charles. Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby. Jackson, Miss: The University Press of Mississippi, 2012. Print.

Steranko, James. The History of Comics 1. Reading, Pa: Supergraphics, 1970. Print.

Tibbetts, John C. and James M. Welsh. His Majesty the American: The Cinema of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. New York: A.S. Barnes and Co. 1977. Print.

Toth, Alex and Darrell McNeil. By Design. Los Angeles: Gold Medal, 1996. Print.

Toth, Alex. “A Forward’s Look Back and Askance” (author’s introduction). The Complete Classic Adventures of Zorro. Fullerton, Ca: Image Comics, 1999. Print.

Vance, Jeffrey with Tony Maietta. Douglas Fairbanks. Berkeley, Ca: University of California Press, 2008. Print.

Williamson, Catherine. “’Draped Crusaders’: Disrobing Gender in The Mark of Zorro”, Cinema Journal 36.2, (Winter 1997): p 3-16. Web. O9 Dec. 2013. Link

Thunderjet! Revisited!

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All text from The Korean War: A History (2010) by Bruce Cumings

Scans taken from Frontline Combat #8 by Harvey Kurtzman and Alex Toth. A story based on fact….

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Thunderjet_0001a

Curtis Le May …said that he had wanted to burn down North Korea’s big cities at the inception of the war, but the Pentagon refused—“it’s too horrible.” So over a period of three years, he went on, “We burned down every [sic] town in North Korea and South Korea too, …Now, over a period of three years this is palatable, but to kill a few people to stop this from happening—a lot of people can’t stomach it.”

 

Thunderjet_0002a

General Ridgeway, who at times deplored the free-fire zones he saw, nonetheless wanted bigger and better napalm bombs…in early 1951, thus to “wipe out all life in tactical locality and save the lives of our soldiers.”

 

Thunderjet_0003a

The Pujon river dam was designed to hold 670 million cubic meters of water, and had a pressure gradient of 999 meters…According to the official U.S.Air Force history, when fifty-nine F-84 Thunderjets breached the high containing wall  of Toksan on May 13 1953, the onrushing flood destroyed six miles of railway, five bridges, two miles of highway, and five square miles of rice paddies…After the war, it took 200,000 man-days of labor to reconstruct the reservoir.

 

Thunderjet_0003b

One day Pfc. James Ransome, Jr.’s unit suffered a “friendly” hit of this wonder weapon: his men rolled in the snow in agony and begged him to shoot them, as their skin burned to a crisp and peeled back “like fried potato chips.”

 

Thunderjet_0004a

…Operation Hudson Harbor…part of a large project involving “overt exploitation in Korea by the Department of Defense and covert exploitation by the Central Intelligence Agency of the possible use of novel weapons.” This project sought to establish the capability to use atomic weapons on the battlefield…lone B-29 bombers were lifted from Okinawa…and sent over North Korea on simulated atomic bombing runs, dropping “dummy” A-bombs or heavy TNT bombs.

 

Thunderjet_0005a

After his release from North Korean custody Gen. William F. Dean wrote that “the town of Huichon amazed me. The city I’d seen before-two storied buildings, a prominent main street-wasn’t there any more.” He encountered the “unoccupied shells” of town after town, and villages where rubble or or “snowy open space” were all that remained.

 

Thunderjet_0006a

Meray had arrived in August 1951 and witnessed “a complete devastation between the Yalu River and the capital,” Pyongyang. There were simply “no more cities in North Korea.”…A British reporter found communities where nothing was left but “a low, wide mound of violet ashes.”

 

Thunderjet_0007a

…at least 50 percent of eighteen out of the North’s twenty-two major cities were obliterated.

 

Thunderjet_0008b

…the pilots came back to their ships stinking of vomit twisted from their vitals by the shock of what they had to do.

 

 

 

Clarity and Intent

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A few books by some of comics’ (male) best and brightest of several eras. Some of these have been out for awhile, but I only just got around to them.

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Jon Fury in Japan

Alex Toth’s only extended stint on a continuity strip was done for his post newspaper when he was stationed in Tokyo in the Army in 1955. Jon Fury was his first effort writing for himself. While he could brilliantly interpret the scripts of others, Toth faced nearly insurmountable difficulties to construct his own. He tried to emulate Milton Caniff’s narrative mastery, but he certainly didn’t “get” one of Caniff’s greatest assets: his use of female characters of depth and agency. Toth is strictly old boy’s club, but truthfully his male characters are not much better defined. The storylines feel forced and they are riddled with overlong exposition to the extreme.  Despite these drawbacks, his art is highly developed and constrained only by the sheer weight of text; these are dynamic, elegantly designed episodic pages in the Caniffian Sunday format. More than any of his contemporaries, Toth reached for clarity of comics expression and here he exhibits his mature style in a serialized form, where weekly deadlines dissolved the hesitations dictated by his perfectionism.

The late Toth did the work for black and white reproduction and so that is how it is seen in IDW’s recent Toth bio Genius, Isolated. The original art  was done in a process similar to mimeograph, basically drawn directly on waxy plates, which quickly begin to degenerate in the process of printing, even in such a small print run as these strips had, with the result that a complete pristine set is probably impossible to put together. The art restoration in the panel below from the slick color comic book version, Jon Fury In Japan, is definitely better than it is in IDW’s hardcover bio. In both recent versions, there are many minute amendments to the drawings by other hands; these are more pronounced in the color comic.


One panel’s restorations: left, from IDW’s version, right, from the comic.

IDW’s reconstruction of Toth’s original lettering of the later pages is readable, but in the comic book version, Toth’s lettering has been removed on most of the pages, which are re-lettered with a cold and inconsistently scaled digital font. This may read easier, but the artist’s hand is lost. And, emphasis via bold type has been added to Toth’s dialogue. As well, if art done for black and white must be colored, Toth’s is better suited to flatter hues, a four color comic book or Sunday strip-like color. The example shown above is atypical; overall, the too-plastic fades and color modeling feel anachronistic to the period piece. Plus, although effort is made to color the protagonist as a native American, many color decisions are counterintuitive, for instance in the pink jacket of the thug also seen on the cover.

Left: xerox from the original printing. Center: IDW version. Right: color comic version.

Granted, the pages needed repair, but work so pared to its essence is subverted by overt interference, much less the overkill of the comic package. Fortunately, Jon Fury in Japan also contains Toth’s final interview, significant for its emphasis on his animation career. Other than a few questionable photos, this has a good selection of panels by Toth and his influences and the coloring imposed on these is more appropriately restrained. (Paul Power, $11.00)

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“Red Tide” in Dark Horse Presents #3

Chandler: Red Tide was released to the  book trade in 1976 as the first American original full-color mass-market graphic novel. It represents Jim Steranko’s longest, most ambitious auteur effort in the comics medium to date. The two-panel-a-page layout with dual type blocks underneath is constructed in such a way as to be unusually immersive; in the act of reading, the obviously separated art and text come to simultaneous apprehension. The art was drawn in pencil without feathering and with minimal holding lines; Steranko’s excellent comics-like color separations often define the forms. The original book has a pulpy chiaroscuro feel that echoes the great noir films to which the story effectively pays homage. The representations are likewise mostly typical of the hard boiled dick genre; for instance, the protagonist and the leading lady have a prior history and her passion is reignited when she senses “something more than anger behind” his slap. On the other hand, there are appearances by a lesbian cab driver.

A reissue of Red Tide enhanced by the author has been looming  for years and now here’s a taste with an excerpt of the first chapter, in Dark Horse’s slick house anthology title. Steranko expands the possibilities of digital color while reiterating that cartooning devices like holding lines, heavy outlines developed to contain badly-registered color inks, are no longer essential with tight full color printing. He transforms and rebuilds his images into layered digital paintings that greatly resemble the airbrushed Art Deco graphics and advertising art of the period depicted. There is an impressive depth to some of the images that far outstrips what he was able to do in the method of the first printing.  He is able to amplify the visual connection to Chandler’s milieu with contemporary tools while exploring the intrinsic qualities of those tools with imaginative verve.

Perhaps this new version puts undue emphasis on the images, in terms of the time involved in the readers’ perception of them relative to the reading time of the text. The expanded density of the art as well as the altered justification of the type blocks conspire to disrupt the 2/1 art-to-type ratio which is key to Steranko’s immersion formula, one of the most important virtues of the book.

Still, any new (or newish) comics by Steranko are welcomed. What he did with these pages is very interesting and no doubt the completion of the augmented edition will be impressive. I can see the amount of time and effort he has to put in to finish the whole book to the level of this excerpt though, and so perhaps in the meantime, Red Tide can be put out in a nice facsimile edition so it can get the attention it has long deserved and he can finish this new enhancement as he will, without pressure. (Dark Horse, $7.99)

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Is That All There Is?

I recently read a review of Joost Swarte’s collection of most of his comics work that complained of the scale of this small hardcover, but I think it has a jewel-like quality. It is a beautiful little book that one can delve into periodically to simply enjoy Swarte’s exactingly rendered, beautifully colored comics pages.

The art is the thing here. While there are some engagingly animated sequences, the stories seem mostly clever, sometimes flimsy cause-and-effect variations created as supports for Swarte’s meticulous cartooning science. As with Toth, the more interesting aspect of the work is the way that the art manifests the ideas, such as they are—Swarte is a master of page architecture and image construction and he also has a tendency to reflexively expose his practice, which is why he is so revered by comics structuralists such as Art Spiegelman. The Franco-Belgian clear line derived from Herge and his forms of representation have their most refined outlet in Swarte’s short absurdities, reprinted from his Modern Papier and a host of other comics periodicals here and abroad including Metal Hurlant, Charlie and Raw. (Fantagraphics,$35.00)

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Madwoman of the Sacred Heart

I love the recent translation of Alexandro Jodorowsky and Moebius’  Madwoman of the Sacred Heart. A black and white version published in the USA in 1996 contained only the first two parts (it was completed in 1998). This  full color trade paperback of the complete Madwoman shows the best efforts of both men, far outstripping their earlier collaborations on The Eyes of the Cat and The Incal trilogy. Jodorowsky’s scenario is hilarious, an incisive and compulsively readable satire of sex and religion, for starters, that offers Moebius the opportunity to draw his single most immersive work of comics storytelling. The seemingly effortless flow of Moebius’ panels here rivals the reduced clarity of the best of Alex Toth’s 1950s Dell comics.

The book is a prime example of text and art reading together as equal forces at the service of the narrative. There are plenty of places for writer and artist to shine, but one is rarely brought out of the narrative to marvel at the construction, even when it frequently veers to philosophical discourse or transcendent visualization. I usually complain if Moebius does not do his own coloring, but here several colorists did an effectively punchy but tasteful, organic job of it; even if it is digital, most of the color looks like painted bluelines.

My first impression was that it takes some considerable suspension of belief to accept that the Heinleinesque protagonist (who is apparently an amalgam of the authors) holds such sexual magnetism for beautiful young women (and men), but Marguerite informs me that the French have such high regard for their intellectual heroes that an elder philosophy professor from the Sorbonne might indeed be considered quite sexy. At any rate, Jodorowsky and Moebius’ trangressively libidinous epic is played out so beautifully, without ever feeling forced, that the ride is taken willingly and has many rewards. (Humanoids,$24.95)
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Paying For It

Chester Brown has represented freedom to me for such brilliant improvisations as his original complete version of Ed the Happy Clown and The Little Man and I also admire his Biblical adaptations and Louis Riel—but Paying For It is a constricted,  joyless business. As a comic by Brown this has a certain mastery of form and the art is technically as good as ever, but the reader barely notices it, because to a large degree the art serves only to drive the reader through the book. It is primarily a reading machine and one is driven to focus on what is being said in Chester’s voice in the form of a memoir.

I would have little interest in reading such a john’s-eye view in prose form and as johns go, I am not made to feel sympathetic to Brown. He frets briefly about the possibility of an undercover sting, but where prostitution is a crime, it is one that prostitutes are prosecuted for, not johns. He worries a lot about being robbed and the expense, the money. He is concerned about girls that look too young, but for his  liability alone, one assumes, because he can hardly tell if they are of the age of consent, or not:  he declines to have sex with any women above a very young age, although he himself is forty and stretched a bit tight, at that. I’m no oil painting either, but really, it can’t be much of an aesthetic experience for the women that have to deal with him and they could be his daughters.

The exhibitionism here is similar to his ruthlessly honest explorations of his teenage years in the later Yummy Furs, but here, the whole gives off an aura of creepiness on the part of its author. Sex is to Brown reduced to a physical function, it’s all about him and his pleasure or release. Brown doesn’t draw the faces of the prostitutes he visits—well, except for panels such as those I scanned. Ostensibly for the reason of preserving their anonymity, his ploy effectively dehumanizes and reduces them to 3-dimensional versions of the bodies of the Playboy playmates he masturbated over in his youth. He essentially jerks off with real people! Actually, drawn as cartoons, they again become 2-dimensional and there is little variation to distinguish the progression of faceless women at all.

I don’t dispute the case he makes in his comic and annotations for the escorts, but the show of concern he makes for their circumstances. One gets the sense that Brown wouldn’t care about or do art about any of it, if he wasn’t trying to justify his involvement. In practice he seems devoid of empathy or affection. We are treated to many panels drawn from an overhead, Brueghelesque perspective of Brown banging away hell-bent for leather, getting his money’s worth. He can motivate himself to solicit prostitutes and then do the years of work involved in a graphic novel and share himself with the world, but he can’t get it up to fight for love. All the effort that goes into a relationship…who needs it?  In this case, listening to his friends might have helped; they all try to give him good advice. But, as his pal Seth says, “Chet’s a robot.”

He’s also a cheapskate:  he’s not the one “paying for it.” We who buy the book are and in addition, this thing was subsidized by generous grants! It’s fucking depressing. (Drawn and Quarterly, $24.95)

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“Amber Sweet” in Optic Nerve #12

Adrian Tomine uses his work to thoughtfully explore multicultural and  interpersonal relations. His work exemplifies the reader immersion and simultaneous cool remove that a refined visual orchestration can lend to a narrative.  “Amber Sweet” is an expanded version of Tomine’s great piece from the massive Kramer’s Ergot #7. His concise and elegant drawings and color give a measured, airy tone to his ironic tale of the torments endured by a young woman because of her resemblance to a well-known porn star. When they meet, the contrast is telling: the real Amber is self-possessed; she handles her admirers with a blithe “Hey! What’s up?” or poses with them for a picture, butters them up a bit and then brushes them off. It is her choice to do what she does, but her choice has inadvertently isolated her doppleganger, who is continually harrassed by aggressive men. This destroys the relationships of “not-Amber,” whose eventual distrust of all men is often justified. This is underlined by Tomine in the scene below, in which two young men impose themselves upon her, denying the implications of their simultaneous wanking while assuming her companion’s complicity in their homosocialism. (Drawn and Quarterly, $5.95)

 

Genius, Clarified

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Greg Sadowski and Fantagraphics’ Setting the Standard is perhaps the best book on Alex Toth that has been published thus far, because it represents the complete body of Toth’s 1950s work for Standard Comics, reproduced as closely as possible to its original printed color form (1). Toth did his art with the intent that it be colored and so, even though the colorists at the time ignored the artist’s color notations and most often made uninspired color choices, still the art can only be considered complete in the form for which it was intended. For this volume, editor/designer Greg Sadowski meticulously cleaned up the pages of the original comic books.

Sadowski takes a straightforward, comprehensive approach and so Setting the Standard can rest comfortably on the bookshelf next to Fantagraphics’ other excellent recent collections of essential comics such as Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant, Roy Crane’s Captain Easy and Buz Sawyer and Carl Barks’ Disney epics. The Valiant and Easy volumes set a high bar for the reproduction of classic, beautifully colored Sunday strip pages, but comic books present a different set of difficulties, due to cheap, misaligned printing and often perfunctory coloring.

Recoloring might help, but as can be seen by various reprints where older works have been slathered with airbrushy digital effects, restraint is to be desired. Some options are the semi-faithful recoloring that Barks recieves in the handsome, just released Lost in the Andes, or the recoloring that Sadowski has been having Marie Severin do for his Bernard Krigstein books, though these approaches are dependent on access to clean copies of the black and white art. For Setting the Standard, Sadowski went back to the source to provide another practical model for the reproduction of old school four-color comics.

I have Best Romance #5 which contains Toth’s first job for Standard, “My Stolen Kisses”, which is also the first story in the Fantagraphics book.  This particular comic is dog-eared and scotch-taped but the color is actually not badly registered, however,  comparisons of panels from it and from the collection still show the effort that Sadowski put in:

Left: panels from the original comic. Right: Sadowski's cleanups

Sadowski painstakingly corrected the images where the color in the original comics was off-register, minimized the bleed-through of “ghost” images from the printing on the reverse sides of the pages (in some cases he replaced mottled single color backgrounds with clean areas of color) and restored the areas around the images and behind most of the lettering from the color of decomposing newsprint to white—daunting efforts when one considers that he did some 400 pages worth.

The stories themselves are not stellar, but that was “standard” for the time. This type of presentation is effective for the work of non-writing art stylists of 4-color comic books such as Toth, who all worked with scripts that were rarely intended to be more than cheap pulp entertainment; the onus was largely on the artists to make the material resonate. Here we are treated to many tales that are dignified only by Toth’s determination to wring feeling from them.

Even the best stories here are redolent of the banal false consciousness of 1950s America. They are mostly forgettable junk—humans prevail over the world domination plans of implausibly gullible aliens, foolish criminals get their just desserts, a woman is charmed when her suitor names a cow after her:

Or, they can be offensive junk: vengeful soldiers bury dehumanized “gooks” alive with a bulldozer, a woman struggles to prove to her husband that she can do better housework in order to preserve her marriage.

Toth’s oft-cited praise for the Standard scripts of Kim Aamodt falls flat when one actually reads them. A story described as one of Aamodt’s best portrays a woman torn between an older and a younger man. The dilemma is resolved when the older man bows out because “you kids…belong together.” Okay, it’s efficiently written and it is a great art job:

Page with my favorite Toth montage, from Man of My Heart

But, as in the other stories here, women are not allowed to make their own decisions. More so than Toth’s other assignments, the romance comics do give the artist a chance to draw a range of emotions and choreograph more intimate stagings, but they are also intended to program young girls to be subservient. In most cases, it is only that Toth drew these stories that elevates them from a justified place in the dustbin of comics history.

There are a few interesting stories though and thanks to Toth, many passages of thoughtful comics storytelling. The romance work is often brilliantly articulated and visualized with glamorous drawings that rival those of the illustrators famous for depictions of beautiful women who inspired Toth’s interpretations, Al Parker and Jon Whitcomb.

Toth’s handling of horror and suspense is intuitive, sometimes harrowing and exhibits his more radical inventions. “Grip On Life” is one story that sticks with me; it is a brutal rendering of an abusive husband who brings his wife back from the dead to serve him. Here and also in the shadowy peripheries of “The Shoremouth Horror” and “Galloping Chad Burgess”, Toth’s compositions are partially obscured and his extremes of emotion barely glimpsed.

A simultaneously realistic and abstract splash leads to atypically explicit abuse

IDW’s Toth biography proves its value as a companion to collections like this. In examining Genius, Isolated‘s appended timeline of published work for this period, one begins to see the progression of Toth’s efforts to address the critique of DC production ace Sol Harrison: “You don’t know what to leave out.” One sees the artist vacillating over years as he goes back and forth from clutter to simplicity and back and forth again.  1952 sees him end his first tenure at DC Comics with some beautifully realized collaborations with inker Sy Barry including the affecting “Queen of the Snows”, to move on to these works for Standard and his concurrent collaborations with Harvey Kurtzman at EC.

The three EC stories are spread over the same three years Toth was at Standard and form a learning curve of themselves. Kurtzman’s practice was much more sophisticated than anyone else Toth ever worked with and it seems that he absorbed a lot of storytelling information from acting in the subservient role that Kurtzman’s autonomy demanded of his artists. In the first, “Dying City” from 1951, Kurtzman inked Toth’s pencils and Toth appreciated that the inking “simplified my drawings and dropped in some blacks that I hadn’t even figured on. He made it simple, and powerful.”

Thunderjet, 1952: together, Kurtzman and Toth achieve a high level of realism.

Kurtzman knew his stuff and Toth took the lesson on board, to the point that he alienated Kurtzman on their third co-effort two years later by dropping in some blacks that his writer/designer/editor hadn’t figured on in “F-86 Sabre Jet”, 1953. To further the narrative intent, Toth’s silhouettes accentuate the disorientation experienced by the pilot protagonist (2).

At Standard, with a sympathetic art director/ inker in the person of Mike Peppe and with publishers who seemed to appreciate the value of Toth’s efforts, in the space of a few years profound changes take place in the artist. In particular, he has an epiphany of idiosyncratic simplicity in 1952 with his interpretation of the unfortunately now-anonymously written “The Crushed Gardenia”, which allows him to transcend his influences and find his own most pure style.

The Crushed Gardenia

The storytelling and drawing in this story is minimalist and oblique, with extremely cropped images in panels that are clearly designed with the interrelationships of the whole page compositions in mind. It furthers a tendency for distortion seen earlier, for example in the misproportioned splash of “Triumph Over Terror”:

Um, that's weird

The characters in “The Crushed Gardenia” have squarish heads with the features crushed into the center, which remind me of Milton Caniff’s year or so on Terry and the Pirates where everyone takes on what I’ll call a Flip Corkin aspect: compressed figures with boxy heads.

Caniff's Flip Corkin

The art in “The Crushed Gardenia” is so freshly reductive that it looks as if it might have been drawn yesterday, but a few months later Toth is drawing the densely composed “Geronimo Joe” which reflects the influence of Albert Dorne, later still the elaborately detailed “Lonesome for Kisses” which begins to resemble Neal Adams(!). There are plenty of experiments throughout the Standard stories, but the attenuated drawing of “The Crushed Gardenia”, that represents Toth at his most innovative, will hardly rear its head again until the 1960s.

Toth’s Standard period ends when he is conscripted into the Army, where he formulates his more elegant mature style in his solo Jon Fury strips for his post’s newsletter. After his discharge, he works on book-length stories for Dell and is forced to simplify further, at times drawing with a breezy, nearly generic realism, sans experimentation, then in the early 1960s he begins working for DC again and the drawings become more muscular, the panels become overstuffed with detail. This clutter may have been dictated by Toth’s DC editors, but Sol Harrison must have been scratching his head. Soon though, as the decade progresses through to the cusp of the seventies, Toth will hone it down.

Back at Standard, Mike Peppe is one of Toth’s better inkers and he does a credible job on such concisely pencilled stories as “The Eggbeaters”, “Geronimo Joe”, “Free My Heart” and “The House That Jackdaw Built”. Still, the greatest stylistic cohesion is seen in the instances where Toth inks and letters his own pages such as in “The Crushed Gardenia”, “I Fooled My Heart” and “Too Many Cooks”. But it was Toth’s romance work that was most influential to his contemporaries; John Romita and Ross Andru are noted here, but also for example one can see echoes of Toth’s “I Want Him Back” from Intimate Love #22, 1953 in Frank Frazetta’s Standard romance tale “Empty Heart” from Personal Love #28, 1954:

Toth and Frazetta did some hella good kissing scenes

I’m not claiming this is a swipe, but the first time I saw the Frazetta panel years ago, I immediately thought he’d been looking at Toth. I am inclined to think that Toth exhibits some influence himself, from Bernard Krigstein, in the linear qualities of “The Mask of Graffenwehr” and “Images of Sand”. Then, there is the odd 4-panel split image in “The Phantom Ship”:

The singular tier

This compound panel is a single image broken to imply the passage of time between the individual component panels; the sound effect superimposed on the whole thusly becomes more protracted and the frenzied scene takes on the qualities of an epic battle. It’s a very unusual effect that resembles Krigstein and probes into areas later explored by Steranko. Toth did a romance story with Peppe, “I Do…” in 1955 for Atlas that also has some layouts that remind me of Krigstein.

I had believed that a clue to Mike Peppe’s inking was that it was he who would ink noses with a line along the edge of the nostril that defines a plane between the side of the nose and the underside of the nostril. It is present in the stories attributed to Peppe and it looks wrong to me….it wasn’t something that Toth would do, I thought.

Inked by Peppe, with too-sharp nostrils

Yet in “I Want Him Back”, which Toth signed alone and so is thought to have inked, there’s lines on the nostrils! And maybe I’m crazy, but the main figure in the opening panel of that story looks to me like someone else drew it. Perhaps Toth didn’t ink everything in some of the stories he is credited with?  Or, maybe there were editorial changes to his work?

Toth inked five full stories and a few odd pages here. Apart from the two episodes of Joe Yank, which are inked by his best DC inker Sy Barry (with the main characters’ faces reworked by Art Saaf), the rest are credited or attributed to Mike Peppe and John Celardo.  The hands of Mike Sekowsky and Mike Esposito are noted as present in some of the many stories attributed to Peppe; the book also mentions Ross Andru as a possible inking assist, plus I believe I see Carmine Infantino in a few places as well. I noticed this previously in Greg Theakston’s two-volume black and white Standard collections Toth: Edge of Genius, but I was unable to get Infantino to confirm or deny this when I asked him at a con a few years ago. Some of these questions may be addressed now that this work is readily available to be absorbed by the public and comics scholars.

In Setting the Standard, the choice of supporting material is excellent. The fairly comprehensive interview with Toth from Graphic Story Magazine (and later, The Comics Journal #98) is reprinted with a new selection of reproductions, including appropriate pages by artists who influenced Toth such as Irwin Hasen:

Left: the Hasen repro. Right: my scan of Toth's much later, very Golden Ageish and Hasenesque version of the character

The stories are also annotated in the back with a selection of relevant or at least semi-relevant quotes from Toth’s letters (3).

In the end, interpretive cartoonists such as Toth must be judged by the quality of their realizations of the scripts they were given, good or bad. Isolated or excerpted pages don’t give any idea of the work; only whole stories can provide the intended reading experience. In Sadowski’s book, Toth’s work speaks for itself and the artist likewise. The book’s assemblage and design are very well done to make a package which is pulpy but tasteful, not cheap nor overly slick, not high/low cute or old-boy sentimental. It provides a complete and important body of work by a great cartoonist.

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Footnotes

1. My other favorite Toth book is Manuel Auad’s One for the Road, which collects all of the black and white comics Toth did for Pete Millar’s 1960s hot rod magazines, which I like for similar reasons: it collects an entire body of often-outstanding comics from obscure periodicals, that would be exceedingly difficult and expensive to track down, which can now be read/appreciated in their entirety. Similar collections of Toth’s Warren and DC Comics work should now be published.

2. I only found one mistake, one that has been replicating in Toth books for a while: Frontline Combat # 12 is actually dated May/June 1953, rather than November 1952 as it is listed in Jim Vandeboncoeur’s Toth index; when corrected, “F-89 Sabre Jet” comes after “The Crushed Gardenia” in the timeline. Their proper placement clarifies Toth’s progression; that is, apart from the possibility that either story was held for a time in inventory by their editors.

3. In Setting the Standard there are references to Toth’s annoyance with the efforts of Standard’s chief letterer Herb Fields. In researching this article, I came upon a letter in John Hitchcock’s compendium of his Toth postcards, Dear John, which amusingly depicts and describes a visit the artist had with Fields:

Genius, Disempowered

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IDW’s Genius, Isolated is a gorgeous, impressively scaled hardcover with many crisp reproductions from original comic pages. The first of a series of three volumes that are being hailed as the definitive statement on the art of Alexander Toth, it continues the high production standards set by Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell’s previous excellent, essential collections of Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates and of Noel Sickles’ work. But I must begin my critique to say that the elegant, conservative design that works beautifully for an artist like Caniff feels a bit staid when applied to the daring, moody angles and croppings of Toth—I hope that his great work of the 1960s and 70s, to be covered in the second volume, will be presented with a somewhat more elliptical, dramatic design, as befits that period of the artist’s work.

I have IDW’s Sickles book and admire it greatly. I just read several of Mullaney and Canwell’s Caniff volumes and was hugely impressed, by the quality and scale of Caniff’s achievement and by the the editors’ presentation of his life and work. In one of these incredible collections, though, a passage disturbs me—in his introduction to Terry Vol. 3, Pete Hamill writes of the strip’s millions of readers: “…almost certainly they were not reading it for the increasingly wonderful drawings. They were reading it because of the characters and what they were doing. That is, for the stories.”

This is a basic misapprehension of the comics form. In comics, the reader “reads” the images as much as the text. The art joins with the text to a common purpose, the story—which might be furthered, for example, by a drawn expression that shows an intent that is hidden by what the character is saying in a dialogue balloon. Caniff’s art is not redundant, it communicates nuances that are not expressed in his text, or it supplements the information provided by the text. Cartoonists make decisions in their orchestration of word and image in the form of a page which greatly inform and affect the reader’s perception of the narrative. Hamill discounts the contribution of Caniff’s exhaustively researched imagery to the success of the work as a whole; the precise way, for instance, that he is able to bring the vital, proactive female characters that propel his storylines to life in his drawings. And unfortunately, a similar misconception seems to be held by the editors in their book on Alex Toth.

Rather than an art book, Genius, Isolated is a biography accompanied by a selection of photographs of the artist, along with many of his original pages and happily, a selection of complete graphic stories. Despite the pleasures of Toth’s art, though, a dispirited tone of unresolved conflict and failure to communicate permeates the book. There is precious little upside or sense of aspiration or inspiration, of a dedicated artist breaking boundaries. The greater part of the text tends toward the exposure of the faultlines in Toth’s professional and personal life. We are informed in depth about Toth’s life-long depression, his inability to compromise, his lack of diplomacy and outright rudeness to all and sundry. The artist’s family and friends provide a lot of personal data and observations, all valid grist for the mill in a biography of a man who was a seriously troubled and problematic individual, I’m sure. Still, long-speculated-about issues regarding his parents are laid out but remain unexplained, the names of his first two wives are not established, we read of the pathetic ending of his third marriage, the fight he had with DC editor Julius Schwartz  is forensically examined…some of this is either too little information or too much and sometimes, it feels like no one’s business but the Toths.

Genius, Isolated disempowers its subject by focusing on his personal life while failing to articulate what it is about his storytelling that made it special. In this volume, the text does not make a case for genius. The art does, with some reservations. The artist did much of his formative work for DC Comics, but they seem to be saving their early Toth holdings for a collection of their own, since there is only one DC story (a good choice, though: “Battle Flag of the Foreign Legion”). The group of Standard stories reproduced from the original art herein have been reclaimed from Pure Imagination’s reservoir of bleached and restored public domain reprints, but there is not such a clear demonstration of Toth’s rapid growth within the space of a few years in the early 1950s, or an analysis of his form and practice as Greg Theakston attempted in his two-volume Toth: Edge of Genius. Here, the work must largely stand on its own virtues, while the text portrays a man with deep psychological problems, who happened to also be blessed with superior drawing and design capabilities and simultaneously cursed with OCD.

Some new insights are offered by several of Toth’s contemporaries such as Irwin Hasen, John Romita Sr., Joe Kubert, Mike Esposito and Jack Katz and the artist’s private correspondence with friends like Jerry De Fucchio is quoted, but a significant portion of the information related to Toth’s artistic sensibility and process is liberally culled from interviews with Toth’s contemporaries that were conducted by the dedicated comics historian Jim Amash for the special Toth issues of Twomorrow’s Comic Book Artist (#11) and Alter Ego (#63). Then, the selected quotes often seem intended to support explications of one or another of the artist’s perceived negative qualities.  Toth speaks for himself occasionally (and not in his own hand, his writings have been typeset), but often his detractors are allowed to qualify the work. Kubert takes the opportunity to defend his allegation that Toth hacked out the “Danny Dreams” story in Tor #3 by drawing it at print size, even though it is plain from virtually the rest of the book that it wasn’t ever in Toth’s nature to take the easy way out. Toth’s efforts to improve the material he worked with are presented as proof that he was “difficult” since he wasn’t able to keep to his assigned place as an illustrator. Yet, the book seeks to define Toth as an illustrator and in this buttresses past misconceptions about his work, and by extension that of all comic artists who work with writers.

The authors’ choices of which of Toth’s influences to highlight are unexpected and seem intended to press a view of him as more of the lineage of illustration than of comics. The “influences” section is comprised of images and capsule biographies of several obscure illustrators. While I don’t begrudge them their renewed visibility, I wish there were images of the works of Robert Fawcett and Albert Dorne, illustrators whose work strongly affected Toth, in a book that means to be definitive.

An elegant illustration by Robert Fawcett

Toth is a cartoonist, but his comic artist heroes are placed outside of the “influences” section. A few Scorchy Smith dailies are shown, despite that the impact of Noel Sickles’ later graphic work on Toth’s drawing techniques is as pronounced, or more so.  The authors do show a clear correspondence of his neophyte efforts to Frank Robbins’ early work, yet Roy Crane, arguably Toth’s most overpowering muse, rates only a single repro of a relatively weak Wash Tubbs daily strip.

Buz Sawyer: a more substantial example of Roy Crane’s talents.

Irwin Hasen was a mentor and friend to Toth and by the artist’s own account, another prime influence on his work. Hasen gave the authors many quotes, but his artwork is not deemed worthy of a reproduction. In an interview with the author/editor team on TCJ.com, Dan Nadel hones in on this omission and asks, “What did Toth see in (Hasen), as opposed to the flashier, more obviously influential Meskin?” Mullaney reponds, “It could very well be that Alex admired Irwin because he was a working professional that Alex wanted to be. Irwin was certainly among the better artists at DC at the time. It’s a question only Alex could answer.” If one actually looks at Hasen’s work, though, a connection can be seen—-his storytelling, his internal “camera” and page compositions are clear and succinct, his brushwork is fluid and expressive.

Mad fresh: Dondi daily strip by Irwin Hasen
Breezy brushwork by Hasen on a Sunday.

From childhood,  I always could see that Hasen drew appealing comics pages. I trust Toth when he said he learned something of value from his friend’s work—I’d guess that the calculated and deliberate Toth admired the light freshness of Hasen’s handling.

A case is presented that Toth is not much of a writer himself. This is firstly evidenced by an early, incomplete and unseen story, interesting mainly for the rare look at his pencils. Obviously Toth wasn’t happy with it, since he didn’t finish it. He did a later version, “Tibor Miko” from Creepy #77, that wasn’t much better. Then, there is the interminable exposition of his self-written Jon Fury strips for the Army, included here in their entirety or nearly so, although some strips are presented in a badly retouched form (I feel sorry for the production artist who was charged with this task).

Retouched panel from Jon Fury

In Fury Toth tried to emulate Caniff’s writing but falls flat, most embarrassingly so when he phonetically renders the dialogue of Fury’s Mexican hoax wife in the inexplicably typewritten third storyline. The Jon Fury strips are nearly anomalous in Toth’s corpus in that they are so annoyingly hard to read. Granted, he had a difficult time initiating a script, but usually once he had a script, he was a master at making it work.

In his preface, Mullaney writes that Toth “would accept drawing assignments, ignore the supplied scripts, and unilaterally rewrite at his own discretion.” But—-Toth didn’t ignore scripts and his amendments were never unilateral. Instead, he served the story, he made every effort to find the story’s heart. Any alterations he did on scripts that he accepted were based on his instincts of what the story needed. He did the lettering whenever possible, not only for the aesthetic of his unique hand making the finished page, but for the control lettering gave him to (usually) subtly amend the script and streamline the narrative.  What illustrator has ever taken it upon themselves to alter the text of a story? It isn’t done. But Toth continually proved that he deserved such freedom in interpretation and in his efforts, he certainly shortchanged no one. Ironically, even his least sympathetic editors and writers have been the beneficiaries of Toth’s unpaid improvements—his works are often the jewels of their careers.

The overwhelming majority of the scripts Toth drew would hold no interest today if he had not drawn them. An exception is the transcendent yet faithful enhancement of Harvey Kurtzman’s “Thunderjet” that is reprinted here. However,  Toth was unable to adhere to the writer/editor’s exactingly articulated layouts for their most brilliant collaboration, “F-86 Sabre Jet” from Frontline Combat #12.

F-86 Sabre Jet: one of the best pieces either man ever did.

As can be seen from the page above, Toth did not alter Kurtzman’s structure. His offense was that he chose to use oblique silhouettes in the upper tiers, a relatively small change but one which greatly augments for the reader the sense of disorientation communicated by the text and experienced by the pilot.  An angry Kurtzman printed the story, but Toth did no more work for E.C.  Joe Kubert’s later outright rejection of Toth’s Enemy Ace story because of the artist’s alterations to the script is atypical—most of Toth’s editors accepted his improvements. However, these anecdotes do “illustrate” precisely why Toth was not an illustrator. He demanded a level of autonomy in interpretation, even if it meant he would get no further work from a company.

Massive popularity in one’s time is not always a barometer of artistic accomplishment. Toth’s avoidance of the repetition and artistic stasis that drawing series or even full issues of the same character require makes his work hard to find, spread out as it is in anthology titles, and he did not make the regular income that series would have given him. Toth’s son Damon explains, “his integrity was way more important to him than dollars and cents, and he lived by that his whole life.” Yet, the editors insist on supporting the emphasis on character/property that constrains the comics industry and marginalizes peripatetic artists like Toth, by focusing the Dell section on Zorro and including an already much-reprinted story. Although he began with high hopes, the artist disliked the scripts, did not consider Zorro to be his best work and it was the source of the conflicts that ended his Dell employment. His fabulous efforts on some of his other rare book-length Dell comics such as Clint and Mac, Paul Revere’s Ride, No Time for Sergeants and The Frogmen are barely mentioned.

Clint and Mac: a particularly beautiful comic book
A memorable panel from The Frogmen #5

Instead, a twenty page story from Toth’s series of 77 Sunset Strip comics is included, one of the few things in this book that I didn’t already have. It is a bizarre choice, drawn in his more humorous style and it has grown on me, although Toth thought the show and characters were idiotic and this informs his disparately absurd panels, any of which might have been an excellent source for Roy Lichtenstein.

77 Sunset Strip: a no-brainer

Maybe Toth was overqualified to work on such disposable children’s entertainment, but he did it because he was driven to use the comics medium as it stood in his time, to experiment with its properties, to our enrichment. He found ways to believe in the scripts enough to transform them, if not into literary masterpieces, certainly into examples of sophisticated comics storytelling. That sophistication most often came from his skills as an interpretive comics storyteller, rather than from an illustrator’s strict adherence and accompaniment to a set-in-stone text. Toth did well-drawn and designed covers and pin-ups up until the time of his death, but what was missed by his disappointed fans for his two final decades was his approach to comics narrative—and that is where his importance lies.

Perhaps some of my problems with Mullaney and Canwell’s approach will be addressed in their future volumes. However, the second book in the series, the one that will represent his greatest comics work, will be titled “Genius, Illustrated,” a title that makes me despair, whatever the editors’ rationale for using it (“it’s about a genius, and it’s illustrated”). I beg them to reconsider that title, even though there would be some effort involved since the book has been solicited. The term “illustration” describes artwork that accompanies a text, but does not impose upon it. An illustrator has a subordinate role to that of the writer and in bibliographic terms is not considered an author, or a co-author along with the writer of a book. Applying this label to the artist’s part of the collaborative process of comics ignores that comics demand many skills not in the job description of an illustrator, such as staging, timing and the emotive acting of “on-model” characters in the sequential representation of shifting vantage points of movement within three-dimensional space.

Toth had a complex skill-set and a consuming dedication to his art that places his work far above that of his contemporaries. If our greatest interpretive cartoonist is saddled with the “illustrator” label, he is denied what he fought for in his many battles with editors, the frustrations of which surely impacted his personal life, conflicts which grew from his efforts to make some of the greatest examples of graphic storytelling to date. If Alex Toth cannot get his due, then all comics artists who do not write their own scripts, but who contribute a great amount of the narrative content of the comics they do within their drawings, are well and truly fucked.

Toth, Internalized

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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 opportunity to address some critical shortfalls that I have seen in the literature about Toth.

I do feel that Toth’s work is head and shoulders above that of most artists who have worked in the medium thus far. I and many other artists find Toth to be a great teacher. It is instructive to figure out how and why his odd approach works so well. Artists may not see his art in the same way as someone who is not an artist, but there are also many, many non-artists who appreciate the depth of Toth’s skills—and some who do not.

A critique that is often leveled at Toth should be dispensed with. Unfortunately, in order to appreciate his work, one must overlook the quality of the writing in most of the stories he drew. That can be said for every four-color comic book artist that worked with writers. But some seem to blame the artist for this. Even though Toth had higher artistic standards than his contemporaries, he was not any more responsible than they were for the texts they worked with. If not for bad scripts, there would be no Toth comic book art and in fact, there would be no comics at all.

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Toth vs. Kubert

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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 like a lot to them then. He says that at sixteen Toth worked “like a dog–his intensity overwhelming.” While I don’t get the sense that Kubert and Toth were ever especially close as friends, they shared studios and social contacts, and both artists worked for early DC editor Sheldon Mayer. A talented artist in his own right, Mayer was a volatile editor. Toth recalled that Mayer tore up one of his early stories. Kubert says that he saw Mayer “verbally rip a guy apart…and take original pages and fling them right across the room,” but notes that he was not treated in this way, perhaps because he was “bigger.”

Both artists claim Mayer as a key formative influence. In later years when Kubert acheived editorial positions, his relationship with Toth changed as it became one of management and labor. Toth’s efforts for editor Kubert on two stories appears to be the key to their mutual disaffection. Neither party understood the other’s motivations, but as a result, a major Toth work was rejected to be lost to posterity, their friendship ended and in later years Kubert was criticized by Toth. Kubert’s own accounts of their conflicts are inconsistent.

At St. John in 1954 Toth drew a 5 page story for editor Kubert’s title Tor Vol. 1 #3. Danny Dreams was done in a fertile period of discovery for Toth, contemporaneous with his early masterpiece The Crushed Gardenia, as he was formulating his mature pared-down style. Kubert says in a letter printed in 1999 in Toth: Black and White that the story was “drawn close to printed page size—beautiful tight artwork,” but in an interview done in 2006 for Alter Ego Kubert says he was “shocked” and “disappointed” with the work when he first saw it. Perhaps because the original art was so small, or maybe because its simplicity at that time was not what the more detail-oriented Kubert expected, he mistook the economy of line that marks Toth’s great later work for laziness. Or, perhaps it was because Toth omits the folds of most of the ears of the characters in Danny Dreams and draws them as empty curved shapes.

Danny Dreams: flat ears, small art. Tones by Bill Black.

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