Friday, June 1, 2007

The Alex Toth Reprint Stocktake Part 5


And the hits on The Alex Toth Reprint Stocktake just keep on coming…

Hopalong Cassidy starring William Boyd: The Badmen of Roaring Flame Valley!
Alex Toth/Joe Giella
Jimmy Wakely #14, November-December 1951
Mighty Comic #35, June 1963

This makes it 37 Toth reprints spotted in the K.G. Murray titles so far.

Joe Giella is not one of my favourite DC Silver Age inkers. I find him serviceable on the likes of Sheldon Moldoff, but I feel he’s too bland on the more expressive pencillers like Infantino, especially when compared to the likes of Murphy Anderson or Frank Giacoia, or indeed to Infantino’s own inks. In other words he’s a decent enough second tier inker on second tier pencillers, but to my mind is not really suited to bringing out the nuances in the top tier pencillers.

So I’m not overjoyed to find Giella on Toth. Some of the shading is a bit too coarse, and some of the outlines are a bit too heavy handed. (In fact it doesn't look to me like typical Giella inking anyway, but it says so on the GCD so...) Yet in some panels, as in the ones above, this is thankfully not evident so much. The very nature of the silhouettes doesn’t allow for the limitations in Giella’s style, and in some ways plays to his strengths.

And yes, I also thought of Sin City when I first saw some of these panels.

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