Whither the comic book where’s it going, except to hell? The interview includes this famous exchange: Yesterday, the Michael Sporn Animation “Splog” featured scans of a multi-page interview with Alex Toth that was conducted by Bill Spicer for his own Graphic Story Magazine and published in 1969, when Toth was about 40 years old. Unfortunately, the one thing that all of those scans have in common is that they are very low resolution. And at Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine, right here.

You can also read the first episode at, starting here. You can read the first episode of the series, in English (in black and white and in colour) and in Spanish (recoloured), at Horacio Diez’s “CÓMIC, historietas, tebeos…” blog. Cited by comic book artists, historians, and fans as some of Toth’s best work, these stories have been painstakingly digitally reconstructed to look better than the original Dell comic books in this deluxe reprint, which also includes tons of supplemental material. After seeing this and a few other panels I was convinced that some of the strips were produced at short notice, where as with other episodes Toth had a little more time to compose the strips before publication.Comics legend Alex Toth’s piece de resistance, the complete Dell adventures of Zorro, is finally available in a full-color, archival hardcover reprint! Toth, who defined how action/adventure stories are told, set the standard for comic book storytelling with his Zorro tales. There is one particularly beautiful panel, which unfortunately I can’t provide a scan of, where two characters are standing in the shadow of a tree, it would have been perfectly acceptable for Toth to have drawn the subjects in silhouette, but instead the characters are defined with the individual shadows of the trees branches falling on them. With some artists this might give an impression of laziness, but Toth uses it as part of the composition of panel, as a way to highlight the relevant aspect without the panel looking cluttered or confusing. Toth’s lines are quite loose and almost impressionistic in places, with several silhouette panels that work perfectly with the subject matter. Everything on the page is there to further the story rather than to highlight the artists ability.

There’s no grandstanding or undeserved splash pages. On the page at least, Toth’s ego is non-existent. Both Toth and Ditko have an unwavering devotion to tell the story in the most succinct way possible. In terms of Toth’s style I found it reminiscent of Ditko, not in form but in the artists intent.

Zorro by Alex Toth