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Alex Toth was a professional cartoonist. He began his career in comic strips and comic books but is best known for his animation designs for Hanna-Barbera throughout the 1960s and 1970s. His work included Super Friends, Jonny Quest, Space Ghost and Birdman. Toth's work has been resurrected in the late-night, adult-themed spinoffs on Cartoon Network: Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, Sealab 2021 and Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. Toth launched his career at the age of 15, as a generation of illustrators went to war. Initially wishing to draw a newspaper strip ("it was my dream to do what Caniff, Raymond, and Foster had done"), he found the industry "dying" and instead moved into comic books, first employed by Steve Douglas on Famous Funnies. He served in the US Army from 1954-1956 and drew a weekly adventure strip called "Jon Fury" while stationed in Japan. His work at Hanna-Barbara from 1965-1982 included storyboards as well as designs for hundreds of characters, props, settings, and effects. Journalist Tom Spurgeon wrote that Toth possessed "an almost transcendent understanding of the power of art as a visual story component," and called him "one of the handful of people who could seriously enter into Greatest Comic Book Artist of All-Time discussions" and "a giant of 20th Century cartoon design." He was formally inducted into the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1990. Toth was known for his exhaustive study of other artists and his outspoken analysis of comic art past and present. For example, in a 2001 interview he criticized the trend of fully-painted comics, saying "It could be comics if those who know how to paint also knew how to tell a story! Who knew what pacing was, and didn't just jam a lot of pretty pictures together into a page, pages, and call it a story, continuity! It ain't!" In general, Toth lamented what he saw as a lack of awareness on the part of younger artists of their predecessors, as well as a feeling that the innocent fun of comics' past was being lost in the pursuit of pointless nihilism and "mature content." Toth died at his drawing table on May 27, 2006. [5] The following week, Adult Swim devoted bumps to Toth which simply read "Alex Toth 1928-2006". The words then faded out and the [adult swim] logo was not shown, a style the network only uses when mourning the passing of one they deem to be an important person.
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Alex Toth was a professional cartoonist. He began his career in comic strips and comic books but is best known for his animation designs for Hanna-Barbera throughout the 1960s and 1970s. His work included Super Friends, Jonny Quest, Space Ghost and Birdman. Toth's work has been resurrected in the late-night, adult-themed spinoffs on Cartoon Network: Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, Sealab 2021 and Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. Toth launched his career at the age of 15, as a generation of illustrators went to war. Initially wishing to draw a newspaper strip ("it was my dream to do what Caniff, Raymond, and Foster had done"), he found the industry "dying" and instead moved into comic books, first employed by Steve Douglas on Famous Funnies. He served in the US Army from 1954-1956 and drew a weekly adventure strip called "Jon Fury" while stationed in Japan. His work at Hanna-Barbara from 1965-1982 included storyboards as well as designs for hundreds of characters, props, settings
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