I AM AND HAVE BEEN for many years an avid admirer of the work of Alex Toth. I knew him — not all that well, but well enough to realize at a certain point that avoiding contact with Alex Toth was a positive and healthy lifestyle choice.

Toth was a difficult man. He was the Citizen Kane of difficult men. In a career that lasted over half a century, he left behind a trail of angry, hurt, confused and disappointed friends and acquaintances, acolytes and worshipers. I know a lot of that crowd, and after the grumbling, bitching and moaning, all justified, about what a miserable fuck Alex was, to a man (they’re mostly male), the next words are always something like, “But that shot of the boots in Battle Flag…” or “Oh my god, Thunderjet…” or…

You get the picture. Alex Toth was admired and worshiped for his brilliant work, despite a personality so unpleasant editors would not work with him. They knew that what he delivered would be superior to anyone else’s pages, but they’d pass simply to avoid the mishegas of having to put up with his aberrant behavior and abusive temperament. Which brings us to the title of this book, Genius, Isolated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth, the first of three oversized hardcover volumes paying tribute to his brilliant work. This volume covers the forties and fifties, when the artist was in his late teens to mid twenties. To say that Toth found his métier early is to grossly understate the case. We are witnessing a truly prodigious talent in the first wave of, yes, unqualified genius.

I called Toth the Citizen Kane of difficulty, and his body of work has much in common with Welles’. Like Welles, Toth used all the available tropes of his chosen medium — the common language of the comic strip and the comic book — and executed them in a way so profoundly different from what preceded it that the work’s impact on all that followed is immeasurable.

And yet, a motion picture studio executive, with neither a grounding in film history nor more than a casual interest in what preceded his own time, can be shown a sparkling print of Citizen Kane in a screening room, and be bored out of his mind because every single new idea Welles brought to the screen back in 1941 has been borrowed and misused a million times the the last seventy years of film production. The same is unfortunately true of the work of Alex Toth. While most fans of comics were ignoring his astonishing output, professional cartoonists from the late 1940s right up to this very morning have been absorbing the lessons of craft from his romances, war stories, and period pieces. Without exaggeration, a day doesn’t go by in my studio when I don’t look at some piece of comic art by Toth. Now, thanks to this book, and the two volumes to follow, I’ll have a one-stop resource.

In Genius, Isolated, as in many such books, Mullaney and Canwell make an attempt to draw parallels between Toth’s work and his ethnic background, his family and upbringing, and soli...