2014

4/29/2014

Toth

His economy of line, placement of blacks, his sense of design. These are things easily discernible with the eye. Toth's art is bold and for some, "too simple". That's the deceptively obvious misconception of his work. It is not simple. Only through much thought given to composition and layout (and experience), did Toth arrive at pages of such clarity. He COULD have added more line-work - hatching, stippling (which he often did) and the like - but why, when he could define more with one line than three or four.

Many a master illustrator - Toth's peers in time period and creative mastery - advocated the same approach. Every line must have a meaning. Even if simply decorative, they were placed with PURPOSE. As an accent to another line or shape, or to define the same. Question: when does a line become a shape? Toth knew. The shapes created by his placements of black unified a picture's compositional balance, while strengthening its impact.

Often, there was no delicacy of line - he'd ink with a marker and wasn't really bothered with technique in that regard. For each job, consideration of line and rendering of what textures he choose to include, always came back to his rule - Keep It Simple.

This simplicity led Toth to the animation industry, crafting countless model sheets and storyboards - most well known being Space Ghost and the various Super Friends cartoons.

It was his exposure to these working methods that further evolved his art. His brief forays back to comics in the 1970s and 80s were very different from earlier work. This is to be expected, as the majority of artists always strive to improve their art and by nature of experience and time, the art changes.
A funny note, something to look for among some artists: with age and girth of illustrators, figures tend to increase in size. Stockier, thicker figure drawings become common. While this is true of many artists, it doesn't appear in the work of Gil Kane - the figures of his final two decades remained the same proportion (and so did he). Yet look at Kane's style evolution from the 1960s through 1970s (that's surely a post to come).

Toth's most hidden work to many today, are his many stories told at Dell. Dell Four Color and a title or two like Disney's Zorro. Besides some fabulous work for DC on House of Mystery and romance comics, his far more detailed work was found in warren's Creepy/Eerie - some of his final 'full' comic work.