Some of these have been out for awhile, but I only just got around to them. Jon Fury was his first effort writing for himself.
While he could brilliantly interpret the scripts of others, Toth faced nearly insurmountable difficulties to construct his own. The storylines feel forced and they are riddled with overlong exposition to the extreme. Despite these drawbacks, his art is highly developed and constrained only by the sheer weight of text; these are dynamic, elegantly designed episodic pages in the Caniffian Sunday format.
More than any of his contemporaries, Toth reached for clarity of comics expression and here he exhibits his mature style in a serialized form, where weekly deadlines dissolved the hesitations dictated by his perfectionism.
The original art was done in a process similar to mimeograph, basically drawn directly on waxy plates, which quickly begin to degenerate in the process of printing, even in such a small print run as these strips had, with the result that a complete pristine set is probably impossible to put together.
In both recent versions, there are many minute amendments to the drawings by other hands; these are more pronounced in the color comic. The example shown above is atypical; overall, the too-plastic fades and color modeling feel anachronistic to the period piece.
