I mentioned here that DC Comics will soon issue a hardcover collection of artwork that the late/great Alex Toth did for the firm. I also prayed that they would not use a cover Alex’s drawing of Superman had been replaced by one by another artist…and I’m hearing now that that was not the final cover; that it was just a dummy they made up for advertising purposes. Hopefully, when we get the Toth collection, its cover will be 100% Toth.
Alex was one of the most talented artists to ever work in the comic book business and he also spent a lot of time in animation for television. In the latter arena, he was surrounded by many talented writers and artists whose names are largely unknown to the fan community. I know people who love the 1966 Space Ghost cartoons but can’t name a single other person besides Toth, Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera and the voice cast who made that show.
They act like Alex created it all by himself (he didn’t), wrote them all (he wrote none of them) and did all the artwork. He was the lead artist and designer absolutely…but a weekly network cartoon show is not like a comic book. It can’t be all produced by one or two guys. Take a look at the end credits from that series. You will notice a lot of names in there besides Alex’s…
Alex almost certainly deserved more credit than those credits gave him but when fans write about the show, they generally give absolutely none to the other folks there since they aren’t familiar with the names. (And hey, did you notice that they misspelled the name of Gary Owens, who only voiced the title character? The credits on Hanna-Barbera shows often made mistakes like that. And every single one left out a lot of names.)
At WonderCon Anaheim a few months ago, an avid Hanna-Barbera collector showed me a newly-prized acquisition. He’d just paid a lot of money for what was offered as “original Hanna-Barbera production art by Alex Toth from Super Friends.” I kinda broke his heart a little when I told him — well, somebody had to tell him — that the piece he’d bought was probably never used in the H-B studio and was likely created after there was no more H-B studio.
Above is an image I found online of a piece identical to what the Super Friends fan showed me in Anaheim. The most likely way it was made — and this is like a 95% certainty — is that someone who probably never worked for Hanna-Barbera got hold of a black-and-white image of the line art from this model sheet. It’s something like a JPEG scan of Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a drawing that was used in the studio for reference. They may have just downloaded that JPEG from the Internet.
Then they Xeroxed the image onto a cel, painted the back of that cel with colored paints in the appropriate places, let it dry, then put it into some sort of frame or mat and sold it. And they probably did all this fairly recently…
…and, oh, the original drawing was not done by Alex Toth.
I don’t know who did that model sheet. I once heard — from Mo Gollub, who was one of the gents whose name was in those credits you just watched — that Alex did a Superman model sheet for the Super Friends show but it was redone by someone else. The intent was to kind of “split the difference” between Alex’s way of drawing The Man of Steel and the way the character looked on the then-somewhat-recent Superman cartoon series produced by a rival cartoon studio, Filmation. Mo did not recall who had done the redraw and didn’t even rule out himself as a suspect. (Mo, by the way, was a terrific artist. He painted many of the best covers that ever appeared on a comic book, mainly for Dell Comics in the fifties.)
So the piece the kid bought was not exactly what it was represented to be. He felt a little cheated but he was still happy to have it. It reminded him of the Super Friends show he loved. That was another show Alex labored on but not that much and for not that long. Alex was very good at drawing but he was almost as good at quitting. When we both worked at Hanna-Barbera and made a date for lunch, it was always tentative and based on the understanding that Alex might quit the studio before our agreed-upon lunch date. At least once, he did.
He probably didn’t do a lick of work on maybe six of the nine seasons of Super Friends. His influence was certainly visible when he wasn’t on the payroll. The artists working on it were certainly consulting and aping his designs…but he wasn’t working there. Still, when fans talk about that series, his is often the only name they mention as the guy who drew it and sometimes even as the guy who created it, which he wasn’t. And people (sadly) still make money by forging cels and saying they were drawn by Alex Toth and/or actually used in the production of the series many years ago.
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