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Alex Toth was born at half past midnight on June 25, 1928 in New York City. His parents were Sander (Alexander) and Mary Elizabeth Toth. Both could ill afford the happy event but still managed to make the best of it with their only child. His parents were both artistic and musical. Their small flat was always filled with music and singing. While his mother sang as she did the dinner dishes, his father would accompany her with his cimbalom (an Hungarian instrument) until the neighbors would bang on the steam pipes and pound on the walls–critics. With so much time to fill alone, Alex began to doodle at the age of three. His mother would draw pretty girl profiles and watching her may have led him to copying them and later to draw his own. But it was the Sunday funnies, comic books, and after- noons spent listening to daily radio adventure serials that helped a lot to fire up his imagination. Without the advent of television, Alex sat next to the radio sketching characters to match the voices of the characters from his favorite serials. A teacher from his poster class in junior high took time to urge that he make art his craft. So, even though his family was against it, Alex enrolled at the High School of Industrial Arts and studied illustration. While in high school he received his first paid freelance art assignment from Steve Douglas at “Famous Funnies”. After school Alex would spend most of his time at his drawing board doing two or three pages for “Heroic Comics”. In 1947, after graduating from high school, Shelly Myers hired him at D.C. and he worked there until 1952 when he moved to California. Alex was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1954 and was stationed in Tokyo, Japan. While in Japan he wrote and drew his own weekly adventure strip “Jon Fury” for the base paper. Re- ~ turning to the U.S. in 1956, Alex settled in the Los Angeles area and worked for Dell Comics until 1960. Prior to joining Hanna-Barbera in 1965, Alex did animation and comic book work including ghosting “Casey Ruggles” in 1950 and also “Roy Rogers” in 1960. Alex worked for Hanna-Barbera until 1968 and then again in 1973 when he was assigned to Australia for five months to produce the TV series “Super Friends”. Through the years Alex has worked for D.C., Marvel, Standard, Dell, Funnies, Inc., Whitman, Western, and numerous pulps, ad and illustration accounts on both coasts. He has illustrated and written his own stories for Warren Publications (Eerie, Creepy). One of his best known works is “Bravo for Adventure” which was serialized in two separate issues in The ROOK by Warren Publications. Later on it was published in its entirety with an additional four pages of intro by Dragon Lady Press (Canada). It was also published in Europe where it was greatly received and was translated in three languages.
Don, Colin and I interviewed underground comix legend, Spain Rodriguez, and had a great chat about some of his comix history.
Manuel “Spain” Rodriguez, born 1940 in Buffalo, NY, first gained fame as one of the founders of the underground comix movement of the 1960s. After drawing comics in New York for the East Village Other, he moved to San Francisco where he joined Robert Crumb and other artists on Zap Comix. Spain’s early years with the Road Vultures Motorcycle Club, and his coverage of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago as a reporter for EVO are chronicled in his collection, My True Story (1994, Fantagraphics Books). Along with autobiographical stories and politically-oriented fiction featuring his best-known character, Trashman, Spain has produced a number of historical comics. His story of Poe’s astonishing choice for a posthumous literary agent, The Inheritance of Rufus Griswold, originally appeared in Arcade in 1976 and was reprinted in Graphic Classics: Edgar Allan Poe. New illustrations by Spain are in Graphic Classics: Jack London and Graphic Classics: Bram Stoker. Spain’s current work can be seen in the online comic The Dark Hotel at www.salon.com. He recently illustrated a book of Sherlock Holmes stories, available from Word•Play, Inc., www.word-play.com.
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