Friday, July 23, 2010

Hot Rods and Rare Toth


One of the cool things about artists like Alex Toth is that you can stumble across their work in what might seem the unlikeliest of places. About ten years ago my son-in-law gave me a small stack of motoring cartoon magazines, and in a couple of them there were some real gems. Here are two short stories not just drawn but also written by Alex Toth. The first is from CARtoons 26 (December 1965), and is a nice example of the growing influence of the Women's Movement:


The next is a three page short about the trials and tribulations of a corporate executive in the automobile industry, from Hot Rod Cartoons 6 (Sept 1965):


Hope you enjoyed seeing these as much as I did.

4 comments:

  1. These are great! I bet you can guess which one I like best! I have a cute auto-mechanic romance story -- I will try to post it this week!

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  2. Thank you so much for posting these examples of Mr Toth's fine work. As always, your placing work in the specific context of your blog makes me look at it in a different light that I might otherwise do.

    I find Mr Toth's work an absolute joy. Just this last weekend, I worked through his famous critique of Steve Rude's "Johnny Quest". It's something I've done before, and I tend to do so before writing about a style of art that I feel intellectually underpowered to appreciate. There's never been a time that that savage assault on Mr Rude's work hasn't given me a set of clues about how to approach another artist's work. (Oh, but thank whatever it is that should be thanked that I'd never pestered Mr Toth to pass judgement on my work. When that man said "no", he really ought to have been listened to.)

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  3. Jacque: Thanks for linking to your post, which is great by the way. Life has been so hectic lately I've been unable to post, and tomorrow (er, today actually - is that the time!!!?) we set off on our epic 10 day journey to the UK by road and then ship! So its unlikely that I'll post at all for a couple of weeks, but I have to say your feature on "Reach for Happiness" is and is going to remain a blast. I absolutely love Gene Colan's work and his romance comics are something special. I don't have anywhere near the complete run of those so I'll be reading along as you progress through them.

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  4. Loved the old Peteresn car-comics: CARtoons with Unk and his varmints, and Hot Rod Cartoons with Pappy Huggins and his crew... great to see that Toth contributed to them.

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