Staff Picks (Feb14): Genius Animated — The Cartoon Art Of Alex Toth

Publisher: IDW Publishing

Keep it clean, neat and don’t clutter it up with anything unnecessary that’s the basis for comics and animation art as done by the legendary Alex Toth.

Dean Mullaney, Bruce Canwell, and The Library of American Comics along with IDW Publishing presents the third and final volume in its in-depth look into the life and career of Alex Toth. This volume focuses on Toth’s career in the animation field, one where he exceled in design and storyboards. Storytelling was storytelling be it for a four color comic or for the Saturday morning baby sitter.

Toth was a master storyteller, character designer (just look at the power, yet simplicity of Space Ghost), and occasional pain in the posterior. Toth could do it all, from capturing likenesses in adaptations of everything from John Wayne to Gale Storm and Danny Thomas for Dell Comics to Alan Scott the Golden Age Green Lantern to the masked hero of Old California – Zorro.

With Genius Animated: The Cartoon Art of Alex Toth, Vol. 3 the focus is on Toth’s groundbreaking contributions in the field of animation and features many rarely-seen or previously unpublished pieces of art, much of it uncovered in the archives of Hanna-Barbera Studios! Toth’s career is covered from Space Angel (who looked better with the eye patch than Nick Fury or Basil St. John) through Space Ghost, Superfriends, and Fantastic Four, to the end of his animation career with the Bionic 6.

With Toth's commentary on his own work that made cartoons more than Saturday morning pabulum to many of us, the oversized Genius Animated: The Cartoon Art of Alex Toth, Volume 3, is a must-have whether you have the previous books in the series or not and should be placed right next to the earlier volumes in the series that were justly nominated for Eisner Awards, Genius Isolated: The Cartoon Art of Alex Toth, volumes 1 and 2.

~ Steve Leaf