Before you read this, you'll want to have read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 and Part 9. Whew!
Alex Toth was one of the ten-or-so best artists ever in comics. He may even have been in the Top Five. But he was a difficult man to work with, which is why he never worked for one editor or one employer for very long. It was that way with his career in comic books and also in his more-lucrative career in TV animation. Three times during my own, briefer period of working for Hanna-Barbera, I walked down to Alex's office to see if he wanted to go to lunch and I found out he'd quit.
When he was at his best, no one was better…and even at his worst, he was better than a lot of folks at their best. But, well…
As I mentioned eight hundred chapters ago here, Alex was in genuine awe of the work Dan Spiegle was doing on Blackhawk. Alex did not like most of what was then being done in American comic books and would go on long tirades about terrible artwork he saw on certain books, some of which looked jes' fine to me. But he sure liked Spiegle, a contemporary of his who worked in some of the same traditions. There was a period when both men were working on similar material for Dell Comics. Until experts straightened it out, the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide identified a number of Dell books drawn by Dan as by Alex and vice-versa.
After Wildey and Sekowsky began working on Detached Service Diary stories for Blackhawk, Alex told me he wanted to do one…but he had conditions. He wanted to pencil-only, which was okay, even though there was a good chance he'd hate whatever the inker did. I asked him to give me the names of a few inkers he liked and I'd try to get one of them but he said, "No, I want to see what someone new will do with my pencils. DC always gives my work to Frank Giacoia and I love Frank but I'm tired of him. You pick someone new you think will do a good job." He also wanted to do the story "Marvel Method."
Others will tell you there are two ways of writing a comic book. There are actually quite a few but some people in the field only know of "The Full Script Method" and "The Marvel Method." In "The Full Script Method," the writer composes a script that specifies the number of panels on each page, and what the artist is to draw in each of those panels. Then the writer also writes out the captions, word balloons and sound effects. The artist then follows those instructions…not that he or she can't occasionally fiddle with this or that to make it better.
"The Marvel Method" is called "The Marvel Method" because, though it was employed here and there earlier, it was popularized when Stan Lee worked with guys like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko in the early sixties. It's usually described roughly as follows: "The writer writes out a plot outline and then the artist decides how to tell that story in panels, draws it out that way and then the writer composes the dialogue to fit the pictures." That's how a lot of writers who were not Stan Lee have since done it, and sometimes their written outlines are very detailed.
Stan's weren't, especially when working with Kirby or Ditko or any artist he thought was really good at plotting out a story. Often, he'd let them devise the entire plot and then, verbally or with notes, they'd explain the story to him and he'd write the copy. And when he did have input before drawing commenced, it would usually be in a story conference with the artist, the two of them exchanging ideas, and then the "outline" would often be verbal, not written.
There are pros and cons of both methods and of the others. I am of the opinion that the effectiveness of each has everything to do with the particular strengths of the writer and artist involved…and often with the nature of their relationship. I think a lot of poor stories have resulted from a tag-team employing the wrong method.
There are artists who do not do well working "Marvel Method" and any writer who's worked a lot that way can tell you painful tales of trying to dialogue pictures that simply weren't telling the story he or she wanted to tell. I have occasionally been placed in the position of having to write dialogue on pages that did not display any story I could fully comprehend but I didn't have the time and/or the power to have the pages redrawn. I was not Stan Lee, the editor-in-chief of the company, and not every penciler is Jack Kirby.
Actually, no one is Jack Kirby these days and some people who can draw very nice pictures don't have a great sense of plot or storytelling. And every so often, you encounter one who doesn't care. I once had to write the copy on pages drawn by an artist who admitted to me that all he cared about was the art looking cool so he could sell the original art for more money. If the story didn't make a lick of sense, readers would blame the credited writer, not him. (Don't try to figure out which story it was. I was happily not the credited writer on it. I was ghosting for a friend who couldn't figure any coherent narrative either but didn't have the power or time to demand redrawing.)
In these articles, you have seen me rave about the skills of the main Blackhawk artist, Dan Spiegle. He was amazing. But he did not do well working, as some writers and editors tried to force him into, "Marvel Method." Some of the best artists in comics were roughly analogous to Laurence Olivier. Lord Olivier was hailed as one of the greatest actors of his century but he had no gift for improvisation. He could brilliantly interpret any script he was given but he had to have it all written down for him.
I got the best out of Dan by giving him a complete, full, everything-spelled-out script with occasional rough sketches. I did not specify camera angles very much because he was better than me or anyone in his selection of them. But it was like they tell young film directors: There's such a thing as giving your actors too much direction and such a thing as giving them too little. A good director knows how much to give and it may not be the same amount with every actor.
Toth was on a kick to work "Marvel Method." A few years earlier, we'd done one successful (I thought) collaboration with him working off my full script. This time at his insistence, I gave him an outline and then I discussed the story with him. He assured me he liked the plot and then went off to draw it all out in pencil. Soon after, he turned it in to me, saying he had a great time and was eager to do another.
Here's where it all went off the rails. When I sat down to go over it…well, it was the story I'd outlined and it was the story we'd discussed…but only sort of. There was, of course, nothing wrong with the drawing. Alex Toth simply did not do poor drawings. But it was what he'd drawn that gave me a problem. To tell a certain story, you need to convey certain information and he had just not conveyed certain story points in his staging, nor had he left me opportunities to insert them into the dialogue. To make what I hope will be my last movie analogy here, it was like he'd filmed my screenplay but he'd replaced certain key scenes with improvisations of his own.
I went painstakingly over the pages and made notes of panels I felt I needed Alex to revise. It wasn't much — way less than a half-hour of work for a guy as fast as he was — but I was somewhat scared to ask him. I'd heard him carry on about idiot editors and stupid producers who demanded what he thought were inane changes. But what had to be done had to be done. I drove to Hanna-Barbera, all the time mentally rehearsing the calm, respectful way I could explain to Alex why he had to redraw what I needed him to redraw.
When I got there, his office was empty and someone told me he'd just quit again. I'd missed it by minutes.
I decided that on my way home from H-B, I'd stop at Alex's house and make my little speech. But before I left to do that, Don Jurwich came into my office. Don was the current producer of Super-Friends, a series Alex had largely designed and for which he still did a fair amount of artwork — model sheets and storyboards. He asked if I was available to write an episode of the show and before I could even answer, he told me what had happened with Alex.
Alex had been drawing storyboards for the series. Storyboards, in case you've never seen them, are like comic books with the dialogue under the panel instead of in word balloons. They're a visualization of the material and every artist who thereafter works on that episode is following the staging and camera angles indicated by the storyboard artist. Alex was a very, very good storyboard artist.
But in this case, he'd also taken it upon himself to play story editor. He found major faults with the script and in boarding it, he'd rewritten a few large chunks of the story including the dialogue that went with those chunks. Let us call that "Script A." He handed in that storyboard for Script A and before he went over the board, Don gave Alex the next episode, which we shall call "Script B."
Alex read it over, thought B was worse than A, and sent it back to Don with the following note…
In the meantime, Don had examined the board for Script A. Thirty minutes or so before I found Alex's office empty, Don was in it telling Alex that he'd have to redo most of the storyboard for Script A. The network had approved it as written and much Hanna-Barbera money had been spent to have the show's large voice cast come in and record all the lines, including the ones Alex had then changed. Everything had to be put back the way it was…
…and it was, though not by Alex. He'd started yelling at Don and Don had started yelling back…and I later heard the story from Alex and his account matched exactly, differing only in recollections of which of the two men had hurled which profanities and threats of physical violence at each other.
As Don told me his version, I suddenly decided this might not be a great day to go to Alex's home and ask him to redraw pages on that Blackhawk story.
If I'd had a week or two to let him cool down, I might have but I didn't. I had an inker waiting and before it went to him, I had to get it lettered. I'd promised Alex someone who wasn't Frank Giacoia and hadn't inked his work before. There were plenty of good people in that category and one of them was Steve Leialoha. Steve was (and remains) a superb artist and as such is always in-demand. But when I called him in San Francisco and offered him the chance to work with Alex Toth, he couldn't say no. He told me, "I have a little window of opportunity open." If I could get him the pages by a certain date, he would be thrilled to ink them.
So I went home and did the best job I could at writing captions and balloons that would make the story make sense. I just read it again for the first time in many years and I did a worse job than I remembered…and I remembered doing a pretty poor job. I also — with a chutzpah I couldn't summon up today if my life depended on it — did a little repenciling of a few things. No one has ever noticed but I, an artist about a thousandth as skilled as Alex Toth, changed a few things Alex drew.
I would not do that today. I did a lot of things back then I would not do today, along with some I couldn't do if I wanted to.
I sent the pages and my script off to DC Comics in New York with a note to have them lettered and sent to Steve Leialoha and I gave them his address. An assistant back there had them lettered and then gave them to Frank Giacoia to ink.
No one told me this. I found out on the day before Steve's "window of opportunity" opened and he phoned to ask me when he'd be getting the Toth pages to ink. I called New York and found out that Frank had already done that. When I asked the assistant there why Frank and not Steve, I was told, "Frank came by and he really needed work. That was the only thing we had around to give him." Ernie Colón was still the editor of Blackhawk then and he'd okayed it even though he'd also okayed sending the job to Steve Leialoha. Steve, thankfully, forgave us both.
I don't think I ever made those mistakes again, at least not all on one story. I also never wrote an episode of Super-Friends. The regular writer had a contract to write them all and that was fine with me. I'm not so sure I could have lived up to Alex's recommendation in that drawing so even later when that writer didn't have all the episodes locked up, I declined other offers to write for the show.
And perhaps because of that, I managed to stay friends with Alex after that Blackhawk story, though I don't think we ever mentioned it. Maybe that's another reason we stayed friends. My visits with him increased for a time after his wonderful wife Guyla died in 1985 and he went through periods of wanting to be alone, alternating with periods of very much wanting not to be alone. But the more we talked, the more we had arguments — often about politics — and I increasingly felt a friendship-ending one was coming.
Also, Alex had enablers for his darker hermitic periods — fans who did his shopping so he didn't have to actually leave his house. I was thinking that those of us doing him favors like that were not doing him any favors, and that those who were telling him over and over what a friggin' genius he was were making it harder and harder for him to just sit down and draw a comic book. I finally decided to end our conversations and my visits before things turned ugly.
Some time after Alex passed in 2006, Howard Chaykin wrote in an article, "I am and have been for many years an avid admirer of the work of Alex Toth. I knew him — not all that well, but well enough to realize at a certain point that avoiding contact with Alex Toth was a positive and healthy lifestyle choice." I knew Alex for a longer time than Howard did and it took me longer to arrive at the same conclusion. But I think I also had some better times with Alex. The non-complaining Alex could be as fine a human being as he was an artist.
In 2015 as the first step in fulfilling my lifelong dream of becoming Robotman, I had my right knee replaced. During the operation, I somehow picked up an infection and they had to go back in and change out the metal gizmo they'd put in there. This was about as much fun as you'd imagine. And then after I was discharged from a rehab center, a male nurse came to my home every day for two weeks to give me a shot of some antibiotic I couldn't pronounce. Naturally, he noticed all the comic books on the shelves and on the walls and everywhere.
He said to me, "I had a patient ten or fifteen years ago who had comic books all over his home. I think he wrote or drew them or something. But he was the angriest man I ever met in my life. Every time I was there, he was yelling and cursing about something."
I then asked this male nurse, "Uh-huh. And how long did you treat Alex Toth?"
He laughed, amazed that I'd guessed correctly. Then I told him, "That man just might have been the most talented human being you will ever meet. Or at least inject."
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