Bill Peckmann &Comic Art 08 Feb 2013 05:14 am
Alex in Hollywood
Alex Toth had a lot of different wonderful sides, and they’re all rich and exciting. Bill Peckmann forwarded this material whcih is just great. Take a look with me; Bill takes over writing from here:
- In anticipation and in celebration of the new, long awaited Alex Toth book, “Genius Illustrated” by Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell due to come out in a few weeks, (check out LOAC’s site and Amazon) I thought it’d be appropriate to post three of Alex’s stories from this time period in his career that the new book covers.
This Toth triptych could be called “Alex in Hollywoodland” because that’s where he lived the bigger chunk of his life, and it also illustrates his love for the “good” things that came out of Hollywood. Ever the west coast movie aficionado, it really shows in these Warren Publications stories.
The first story, Alex’s take on the comedies of the silent film era is from the March 1976 issue of Creepy magazine.
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Here is Mr. Toth’s tip of the fedora to Hollywood icons Sam Spade and Humphrey Bogart.
This appeared in the November 1975 issue of Creepy magazine.
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This last story would probably fall into the 1950′s Hollywood Sci-Fi category, and it’s a pretty good fit, but I also believe it’s Toth’s ode to the great Americana illustrators of the Saturday Evening Post magazine of the ’40′s and ’50′s, of which Alex was a great fan. No jazzy panel layouts, just solid art story telling. And, the ol’ curmudgeon really pulls it off, this story of all heart!
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Here are four panels from the ‘Pie’ story, the first version is the printed one, the second version is Alex’s original art. I thought you would like to see what got lost during reproduction. Happily, the new “Genius: Illustrated” book will have quite a bit of original art in it. So, we will get to see a lot more of what Alex’s art looked like when he finally laid down his pens and Pentels!
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on 08 Feb 2013 at 12:44 pm 1.Stephen Macquignon said …
They have a romantic quality, just beautiful to look at
on 22 Oct 2013 at 3:20 am 2.Xavier Munty said …
“Unnreel” was the first comic I remember from Alex Toth, and shock me. Even today, 46 years later, is one of the better comic book pages I see in my live. “Daddy and the Pie” looks like a germ of “E.T.” movie, with all the genious and synthetic narrative of Toth. Thanks for post it!