All Lights Are Green

Friday Comic Book Day.

Last week's Green Lantern stories by Alex Toth were a big succes. And rightly so. Toth's early work is not collected, because most of it was done for DC (whose policy it is to reprint only the adventures of their most 'successful' heroes after their earlier efforts of complete runs of certain titles failed - I am still waiting for the last few Plastic Man books). Artists like Toth, who jumped from one series to the next in the late forties, remain on the shelf. Here is another one of those unexoected jumps, when Toth drew Streajk, the wonder dog for Green Lantern #36. Later he would also do the first few issues of Streak's own title.

Toth All Over The Place

Friday Comic Book Day.

In the late forties Alex Toth drew three Green Lantern stories for DC's Comicbook Cavalcade. He was still learning his craft under the tutilage of editor Sheldon Mayer, but it is fun to see how fast he grew over the course of three consecutive quarterly issues. And how much of his designer/storyteller was already there. If you look closely at the splash pages, you'll see that these stories were ofte made long in advance of publication and shoved around quite a bit. The first story (in CC 26) was made for AA 101, which I presume is All-American #101, a pretty late DC book and one of the last to have Green Lantern as well as Jhnny Thunder before the whole book became a western series. The second story is produced for CC 26, so apparently one issue earlier (eventhough it seems to be the most mature of the three) and the third one was intended for GL #38. As far as I know, no opne has ever tried to make a list of all these Toth stories that takes these production numbers into account.