alex toth's zorro the complete dell comics adventures

He remained, even after decades of professional experience, a fan at heart, albeit an occasionally curmudgeonly one, and this, perhaps, was his primary incarnation for a number of fans.Comics legend Alex Toth’s piece de resistance, the complete Dell adventures of Zorro, is finally available in a 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. (His final work for DC Comics, for example, came in 1996 when he created a new cover for Batman: Black and White.) He was a constant and eager correspondent to many, and his hand-scrawled missives - accompanied, usually, by quick sketches that were better observed and more vibrant than most people’s finished artwork - would show up in magazines such as Comic Book Artist on a regular basis as he held court on the history of comics or the current state of the industry as he saw it. Toth seemingly never put a line out of place, nor ever lost the ability to leave his art filled with seeming spontaneity and life, as if it had been as effortless and enjoyable to create as it was to look at.Īlthough Toth unofficially retired at some undefined point in the late 1980’s, he never really stopped working.

Perhaps most importantly, Toth is the man behind Space Ghost - a hero to children of the 1960s and ‘70s, and quasi-ironic icon to anyone who happened upon Adult Swim’s Space Ghost: Coast to Coast decades later.Ĭonstant throughout all of these careers - comic book artist, comic strip artist, and animation design artist - was an economy and confidence of line, and a seemingly unerring ability to spot blacks on the page so that every single page of work he produced seemed timeless and perfectly balanced, as if it had been created by some infallible being. Returning from Japan, Toth spent some years continuing in comics - including a run on Dell Comics’ Zorro that is rightfully remembered as iconic and character defining decades later - before moving into the field of animation, where he worked as storyboard and design artist on a number of shows that defined an entire generation’s imagination, including Birdman and the Galaxy Trio, Super Friends, and The Herculoids. It was actually his second time doing strip work, but the first under his own name he’d ghosted the Casey Ruggles strip for creator Warren Tufts a couple years earlier without credit, one of a number of ghost artists on the strip that also included Superman artist Al Pastino. By 1954, he was drawing a newspaper strip, after a fashion… but he was doing it for Depot Diary, the newspaper of the army base he was stationed at in Japan, after having been drafted. Within two years of quitting DC Comics, he was living his dream.

Alex toth's zorro the complete dell comics adventures