Setting the Standard: Alex Toth - Softcover

Toth, Alex

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1606994085 ISBN 13: 9781606994085

Publisher: Fantagraphics Books, 2011

Synopsis

• Part of the first generation to grow up with comic books, Alex Toth came to the medium with a fresh eye and enough talent and discipline to graphically strip it down to its bare essentials. His efforts reached fruition at Standard Comics, creating an entire school of imitators. Setting the Standard collects this highly influential body of work in one substantial volume.
• Toth began his professional career at fifteen in 1945 for Heroic Comics, but quickly advanced to superhero work for DC. Responding to the endless criticism of editors, the young artist strove toward a technique free of "showoff surface tricks, clutter, and distracting picture elements." Simply put, he learned "how to tell a story, to the exclusion of all else." After falling out with DC in 1952, Toth moved West. He freelanced almost exclusively for Standard over the next two years, contributing classic work for its crime, horror, science fiction, and war titles. But perhaps most revelatory to the reader will be the romance collaborations with writer Kim Ammodt, Toth's personal favorites. "I came to prefer them for the quieter, more credible, natural human equations they dealt with ― emotions, subtleties of gesture, expression, attitude."

About this title

About the Author

Comic book historian Greg Sadowski has produced more than a few books for Fantagraphics, including landmark volumes on Alex Toth, Bernard Krigstein, and Basil Wolverton. He resides in Asbury Park, NJ, where he looks after the B. Krigstein archives and plays the music of Django Reinhardt with his acoustic trio, OG Swing.

Reviews

Five years after his death, comic-book artist Alex Toth is finally getting his due. Largely unknown to most comics readers, he’s recognized by knowledgeable fans and his fellow artists as one of the most skilled and innovative talents ever to ply the medium. He was recently the subject of the first volume of a massive, three-part biographical project (Genius Isolated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth, 2011), and now comes this hefty collection of all 62 stories he illustrated for Standard Comics in the early 1950s. Working in the popular genres of the era—crime, horror, war, romance—Toth produced a string of stories more visually sophisticated than anything the field had seen. Particularly revelatory are the romance stories, in which the human-scaled, if formulaic and melodramatic, plotlines played to Toth’s strengths: economic yet expressive illustration, artful design, and incisive characterization. And when he was matched to a worthy script, such as the noirish crime tale, “The Crushed Gardenia,” the results were something to behold. Toth would go on to produce even more impressive work in subsequent decades, but this is where he began to leave the rest of the profession in the dust. --Gordon Flagg

Edition details

• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1606994085
• ISBN 13: 9781606994085
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416
• Editor: Sadowski Greg