"This day's experience, set in order, none of it left ragged or lying about, all of it gathered in like treasure and finished with, set aside." –Alice Munro, "What is Remembered"
From New Romances #11 (May 1952), here’s “My Empty Promise,” with art signed — and so, presumably, both pencilled and inked — by the great Alex Toth and script by the great unknown:
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From New Romances #10 (March 1952), here’s “Be Mine Alone,” pencilled by Alex Toth and inked by Mike Peppe from an uncredited script:
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From Boy Loves Girl #47 (June 1954), here’s “Postponed Honeymoon,” with art by Alex Toth:
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Notice how, in panel after panel, Toth chooses to draw Joni looking at Hank rather than at her fiance Barney. The last panel of page two, the fifth panel on page three, and the fifth panel on page six are especially revealing in this regard; it’s the direction and intensity of Joni’s gaze that reveals her heart’s desire.
From Boy Loves Girl #46 (May 1954), here’s “No Love for Me,” with art signed “Alexander Toth” and dated 1953:
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From Boy Loves Girl #43 (February 1954), here’s “I Played with Fire!” with pencils by Alex Toth and inks by Mike Peppe:
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From Exciting War #8 (May 1953), here’s “‘Geronimo Joe,” with art by Alex Toth and Mike Peppe:
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Coming in December from Hermes Press:
The publisher’s description:
Comics legend Alex Toth’s piece de resistance, the complete Dell adventures of Zorro, is finally available in a [240-page] full-color, archival hardcover reprint! Toth, who defined how action/adventure stories are told, set the standard for comic book storytelling with his Zorro tales. Cited by comic book artists, historians, and fans as some of Toth’s best work, these stories have been painstakingly digitally reconstructed to look better than the original Dell comic books in this deluxe reprint, which also includes tons of supplemental material.
You can read the first episode of the series, in English (in black and white and in colour) and in Spanish (recoloured), at Horacio Diez’s “CÓMIC, historietas, tebeos…” blog. Here’s the link: ALEX TOTH. LA IMPORTANCIA DE LA EDICIÓN.
You can also read the first episode at tothfans.com, starting here. And at Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine, right here.
Unfortunately, the one thing that all of those scans have in common is that they are very low resolution.
From Savage Combat Tales vol. 2, no. 2 (April 1975), here’s “Warhawk: ‘Chennault Must Die!!’” with script by Archie Goodwin and art by Alex Toth:
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Yesterday, the Michael Sporn Animation “Splog” featured scans of a multi-page interview with Alex Toth that was conducted by Bill Spicer for his own Graphic Story Magazine and published in 1969, when Toth was about 40 years old. The interview includes this famous exchange:
[TOTH:] Whither the comic book; where’s it going, except to hell?
[SPICER:] Someday graphic novels will take up where comic books are leaving off, but what about the artist who has to sit down and draw them? If some one came to you with a 200-page pictorial novel to illustrate, and if the money was okay, do you think you’d be interested?
[TOTH:] I’d probably blow my brains out. It could be done, and there are plenty of guys around who could and would do it. But I’d rather have twenty 10-page stories than one 200-page story. I found this to be the case when I was freelancing; I could be tired as hell, having just come off a job, when a new script would arrive in the mail and I’d be perked up by it. Despite being tired, and wanting a few days off before starting the next assignment, a new script would get me enthused. Change itself is refreshing; a new subject to tackle is stimulating. It juices you up to get into it right away. To sustain yourself for 100 or 200 pages would be rough. Even those 34-pagers used to drive me up the wall. It would have to be a damn good script to keep me going.
This graphic novel concept frightens me. Although, I have to wonder where comics are going. Where the medium is really going. If comic books are going down the drain, and if newspaper strips are being killed off by ads crowding ever deeper into the pages — and by the lack of any real contributing function of their editors — then I think the strip may be finished. If they would reach out into new subject areas, maybe graphic novels will happen as dollar or two-dollar soft covers in black & white or color. The medium deserves a better shake than it’s gotten from its practitioners who’re making it go on the way it’s been going down. I don’t know who’s really doing the experimentation and planning for new off-shoots of the strip. I’d like to get into it, though, when it happens.
From The House of Secrets #83 (Dec. 1969 – Jan. 1970), here’s “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of,” with script by Marv Wolfman and gorgeous, groovy art by Alex Toth:
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Ragged Claws Network 