If you ever got up at 6 am on a Saturday morning, poured half a box of Lucky Charms into a bowl, and watched a cartoon drama about three girl musicians who dress up as cats and solve crimes, it is time to pay some respect. Same goes for those of you who watched Space Ghost Coast to Coast while stoned, Jonny Quest while sober, or Superfriends while enraged, as a monkey in a purple cape was getting more screen time than Superman.
Alex Toth, the man behind Josie and the Pussycats, The Herculoids, Space Ghost, Johnny Quest, the SuperFriends, and scores of other comic and cartoon legends, died on May 27 of heart failure. He was 77.
Toth started in comics in the late 1940s, drawing the likes of Green Lantern and Zorro. But it was his move to animation in the late ’60s that cemented his place as one of Hanna-Barbera’s Saturday-morning cartoon giants. As comic-book heroes became saddled with regular people’s woes (Green Arrow’s sidekick Speedy got hooked on heroin, for instance), Toth set out to make (or re-imagine) characters that upheld the ideal superhero aesthetic of the old days. Simply (and economically) drawn in bright primary colors, Toth’s heroes were all truth and justice, and not nearly as violent as their contemporary counterparts (Toth’s Batman could even smile once in a while). He also introduced diversity to the DC universe, adding Black Vulcan, Samurai, and Apache Chief to the Superfriends fold.
Along the way, Toth earned a reputation as one of the most difficult artists to work with in comics. To the end, he defended comics and cartoon heroes from future generations who tried to drag them down to earth, either through everyday foibles or artistic rendering.
As he wrote in his wild, rambling, but always interesting doodle-laced column on tothfans.dnyu.com, Toth decried what contemporary artists have done to Batman — that “other” Batman. “The one before the godawful ugly demonic withered decrepit drooling lumpen lined wrinkled mess that recent-interpreters’ve made him — a sickening warpy kinky disgusting whining moaning mean miserable mess — as un/non/anti/heroic as a hero can be — disrespectfully-so! No, thanks! A pox on those deconstructionists, demeanors, destroyers, defamers (of all good, upright, handsome, and humorous, clean-cut, manly heroes of yore) — full of malevolence, they reduce good to evil, cancerous, bile — I loathe and detest them — and those who invited them to destroy, by degrees, a worthy icon of comicbookdom — Batman! And financed his teardowns! Of their very own precious property! Making no sense! Only millions of dollars!!! Which I will never savvy!!”
Toth’s son said his father died at his drawing board in his Burbank, California home.
