One Who Made It (His Own Way)

Just starting a book now, The Ten-Cent Plague, that delves into the Frederic Wertham comic-book scare back in the '50's. The McCarthy-esque flame-up involved televised congressional hearings and everything else. It resulted in the death of EC Comics and the birth of the Comics Code Authority -- an industry self-policing censor.

Some comics creators had their careers go up in smoke (along with their comics). But others forged ahead.
What's new in the book (so far, for me) is the elegant detail in the background narrative -- how the social forces that created the scare also created Crime SuspenStories and other comics EC brought out. The big deal here is not so much that an overweening comics publisher crossed the line and got what it deserved, but that a highly creative company used the means it did to talk about the times surrounding it -- and got burned in the process. Rod Serling (I believe) and many other TV and movie pioneers have cited EC Comics as big inspirations for "The Twilight Zone" and others. That's why people interested in the creative process for popular consumption (like me) are still interested in EC. You can get high-quality reprints now -- not like when I was a comics buyer in the 60's. EC was absolutelyverboten then.

My first comic was the Spiderman Annual #2 (I think), in which the Avengers seek Spiderman's help in tracking down one of its original members -- the Hulk. They offer the Web-slinger membership in the Avengers (with much reservation -- Spidey was an outsider, like the Green Guy, back then), something he declines after finding the Hulk in some alley and seeing him change into Bruce Banner and then back again.

My father was horrified that I'd just wasted 25 cents on a comic book! However, I showed him. Specifically, I showed him a word in a dialogue balloon: "neophyte." That's what Thor called Spiderman when the Avengers first approached him. I promised Dad I would look it up as soon as I got home. I did. It means "newcomer." Stan Lee's script saved the day.

Ten-Cent Plague also lists hundreds of artists and writers who never worked in comics after the Wertham scare. One who isn't on the list was an EC standout: Alex Toth.

Toth (which I believe is pronounced like "oath") was a singularly creative artist, who, with absolute minimal pen-strokes, created vivid scenarios and dramatic characterizations. His architectural approach to telling a story (you have to see one of his pages to grasp what I mean) was unlike anyone else. He claimed as his inspiration Noel Sickles, a comic-strip artist (briefly) whose work is soon to be released in a retrospective volume. But I have a feeling that Toth was largely his own man.

His best work (that I've seen) was in romance comics of the 50's, a section of the Ten-Cent book I haven't gotten to yet. Toth's pages move like a three-camera TV set -- but with the style and grace of a pen-and-ink master. Beginning comics artists would do well to absorb his every lesson (as their predecessors have done) on every page he drew. And he kept at it, long after EC was a memory.

His most famous creation? Space Ghost*. (I loved that Saturday morning TV cartoon -- even in high school!)

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*Toth is credited with the "design" of Space Ghost on wikipedia.org. 


Originally posted to LiveJournal on June 25, 2008