Setting the Standard: Comics by Alex Toth 1952-1954
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