Creepy Presents Alex Toth by Alex TothMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Creepy Presents Alex Toth collects all 21 tales Alex Toth worked on for Creepy and Eerie, horror magazines published by Warren in the 60-80s.
Alex Toth is a legend in the comics and animation fields but I haven't had much exposure to his comics work outside of a couple issues of House of Mystery and some recycled Challengers of the Unknown pages of his that wound up recycled in an issue of DC Comics Presents. I had some Amazon points to burn so I snagged this a while back. Totally worth it.
The stories themselves are more modern, for the time period, anyway, takes on Tales from the Crypt type stories with reversal of fortune endings. They aren't as wordy as the EC stuff and feel more like contemporary comics despite being decades old.
Not content to work in one style, Alex Toth experiments with a variety of techniques in these horror tales, going from minimalist to almost photo-realistic and back again. The man knew his way around a pencil, brush, and inkwell. Toth shifted his style depending on the mood of the mood of the story and maximized the potential of the black and white medium.
It's easy to see how influential Toth's work was after reading through this volume. There are stories with a minimalist approach that had to be an inspiration for guys like Chris Samnee and Mike Allred, and more stark ones that I have to think Frank Miller had in mind while he was doing Sin City. It's a shame Toth never had a long run with either of the Big Two.
Alex Toth deserves the reputation he has as an artistic genius. Five out of five decapitated chief inspectors.
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