ANDY’S PICK :: GENIUS ANIMATED: CARTOON ART OF ALEX TOTH: When we were growing up in the 1960s, cartoons were –as Charles Barkley might say, “turrible”

Thanks to the success of the Flintstones, cheap limited animation was all the rage. so we were stuck watching things like Breezily Bruin and Klondike Kat. But on Saturday morning, thanks to the success of the live action Batman TV show, Super-hero adventure was prospering. The animation was still ‘turrible’ and the family  friendly ratio– for each hero there had to be an adorable dog/monkey or precocious child- but the characters looked great. these were iconic designs that made the image of the characters last far longer than the cartoons themselves. The reason for this enormous bump in visual quality was that the designer for many of these shows was comics legend Alex Toth. In the span of a few years, he created Space Ghost (along with two precocious teens and a damn masked monkey), the Herculoids, Birdman, The Blue Falcon and later the good FF cartoon, Super Friends (two more precocious teens and a damn dog in a cape)and The Legion of DOOM!!!. Those designs live on to this very day. IDW celebrates Toth’s TV work with GENIUS ANIMATED CARTOON ART OF ALEX TOTH HC VOL 03 the final volume of IDW’s comprehensive over-view of Toth’s marvelous career.  There are hundreds of character design pages within these covers.You don’t want to miss this massive explosion of creativity (plus monkeys!)