Creepy Presents Alex Toth
Art by Alex Toth
Dark Horse Books
July 21, 2015
Reviewed by Tim Potter
Reprinted in the original beautiful black and white, Creepy Presents Alex Toth collects all of the iconic artist’s horror stories from Warren comic books between 1965 and 1982. There are twenty stories that first appeared in the pages of Creepy and Eerie and one rare tale from Blazing Combat. The stories feature a variety of different writers, most common and notable among them Archie Goodwin, and four great stories written by Toth himself. Like any collection of this type some stories are better than others, but on the whole the work here is quite consistent and entertaining.
Douglas Wolk provides a brief but very informative foreword in which he discusses Alex Toth’s career and his specific contributions to Warren comics. He outlines a key piece of information when reading Toth’s work: his seemingly changing style of art. One would be hard pressed to identify all of the stories from this volume as having been drawn by the same hand and Wolk does a great job explaining why that is.
“Grave Undertaking” is the first story in this collection and kicks things off with a tale of grave robbing and body brokering in the tradition of Burke and Hare. The story is predictable until the last panel, which comes out of nowhere and is not very well established, but is undeniably fun and has a real innocent charm. “The Strikers” is most memorable for interesting visual perspectives, while “Rude Awakening!” is a sharply written nightmare within a nightmare. There is a definite Twilight Zone vibe and ironic ending to “Out of Time.” All four of these opening stories were penned by Archie Goodwin.
A mystery with horror elements, “Phantom of Pleasure Island” is a visual showcase for Toth, allowing him to draw an amusement park on a California island complete with fun house, roller coasters and a midway. The story is as interesting as the art and makes for one of the best stories in the collection.
The four Toth written stories are presented in their original order, beginning with “Tibor Miko.” It’s a simple story of aliens, UFOs and things that shouldn’t be but are, and is fascinating due to the artist’s decision to leave the most interesting possibilities for visuals to the reader’s imagination. “Unreal!” is the story of an unusual Hollywood star that bears striking similarities to an EC comic story dating from many years prior. “Kui” is an adventure story set on a deserted island and in an ancient tomb, while the final Toth-written story “Proof Positive” is presented in a widescreen visual format that allowed the artist to experiment with different visuals.
“Ensnared!” is an average piece of writing that Toth raises to the level of excellence with his artistic approach. He uses a great deal of negative space, just solid black, between the panels of action and character development. The effect is almost claustrophobic and makes the story one of the most suspenseful in the collection. Another great opportunity to showcase his artistic chops comes with “Vision of Evil.” The story is about an artist creating paintings that are displayed in large galleries but feature images that the general viewing public find horrific and disgusting. It’s really a blank canvas on which Toth can get more gruesome than his usual output.
Featuring an old west freak show, “Jacque Cocteau’s Circus of the Bizarre” warrants mention as an almost scene-for-scene recreation of the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Eye of the Beholder.”
The final two stories in the collection feature the same character, The Hacker, a serial killer pursued by Scotland Yard inspectors. “The Hacker is Back” focuses on killings that occur ten years after the first Hacker murders and their relation to a secret society of upper class gourmands. The resolution is interesting and unexpected. The Hacker seems to return in “The Hacker’s Last Stand,” which is a story with stunning visuals, especially a splash page with copious amounts of severed heads. The second story includes a bit of a rehash of the first, a function of the fact that the stories first appearances were not in the same magazine, but actually months apart.
Creepy Presents Alex Toth is an excellent collection of horror comics from a golden age of the medium. Fans of the art of Alex Toth will find this to be an absolutely essential volume to have in their collection while fans of horror comics in general will find a varied and satisfying read.
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