The Life and Art of Alex Toth – Volume 1: Genius, Isolated

It’s really difficult to say just how impressive the first volume (of three) in the new biography of artist Alex Toth is… which is always a humbling thing for a writer to admit.

First, let’s get this out of the way: I’m a huge fan of the work Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell are doing for IDW Publishing’s Library of American Comics imprint.

With The Complete Terry and Pirates, Rip Kirby, Dick Tracy, Blondie, Bloom County, King Aroo, X-9: Secret Agent Corrigan, Bringing Up Father, Polly and Her Pals and the phenomenal Scorchy Smith and The Art of Noel Sickles, these guys and their compatriots have helped usher in a new Golden Age of comic strip reprints. They don’t get all the credit for it, of course, as there are other great strip reprint books out there, but they deliver time and time again at an incredible pace with stellar quality. They have set the benchmark against which others will be evaluated.

Second, these gentlemen aren’t just colleagues. Despite the fact that I’ve only met Dean in person briefly a handful of times and have yet to meet Bruce in person, I consider them friends. And that’s sort of weird for me. While I’m blessed with a lot of friends, I don’t usually confuse cordial and even positive business relations with friendship…

But I admire the way they approach the work and the results they get. I love the enthusiasm they have for the material and the drive to revive appreciation of this wonderful material. When I get talk on the phone with or get an email from either of them, I know it’s going to launch a great conversation about some impossibly cool part of comics and storytelling history.

Third, no one hits a homerun every time up at bat. Babe Ruth struck out a lot. Hank Aaron stuck out a lot. So did all the great homerun hitters. Just because Dean and Bruce haven’t struck out yet doesn’t mean they won’t. And when they do, I’ll point it out (kindly, I should add).

This time, though, isn’t just a homerun. It’s a grand slam.

Here’s part of what I said about it in Scoop:

Compiled with complete access to the family archives and with the full cooperation of Toth’s children, the book features all manner of the great artist’s early comic book work, including numerous complete stories, samples, roughs, full pencils, and more. It also spotlights a previously unknown, unfinished, and unpublished penciled story from the early 1950s that displays Toth’s talent as a storyteller as effectively as the gray-toned compilation of his Zorro work that Mullaney produced at Eclipse Comics in the 1980s.

 

The refreshing thing about the book is that it neither purifies this artistic hero into some kind of saint nor casts the notoriously prickly personality as more negative than he was; it seeks and most often finds context for the man, but does not laud insensibly or make excuses.

 

Toth’s work, of course, speaks for itself, and this book is packed with it. He was the artistic equivalent of Hemingway, an craftsman whose deceptively simple line work has duped generations of artists into thinking “I could do that!” One of the keenest storytellers to ever ply the trade, this book captures Toth’s budding and quickly established abilities and conveys them well.

The Life and Art of Alex Toth – Volume 1: Genius, Isolated is simply brilliant. It is a “must read” for anyone serious about comics. It’s from IDW Publishing and is actually a steal for the $49.95 cover price.