Alex Toth Biography

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.

Toth's 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. 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 afternoons spent listening to daily radio adventure serials that helped 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 Alex's poster class in junior high took time to urge that he make art his craft. 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 Alex Toth 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.

Returning 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 "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, as well as 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, 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.

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