New School by Dash Shaw (Fantagraphics Books, $39.99) I find Dash Shaw’s work to be strangely invigorating. I admit I had some reservations when I first saw the daunting heft of his Bottomless Belly Button, with its absurdly extended passage of a man running and profusely sweating, drawn in a style so crunchy that it...

Greg Sadowski and Fantagraphics’ Setting the Standard is perhaps the best book on Alex Toth that has been published thus far, because it represents the complete body of Toth’s 1950s work for Standard Comics, reproduced as closely as possible to its original printed color form (1). Toth did his art with the intent that it...

IDW’s Genius, Isolated is a gorgeous, impressively scaled hardcover with many crisp reproductions from original comic pages. The first of a series of three volumes that are being hailed as the definitive statement on the art of Alexander Toth, it continues the high production standards set by Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell’s previous excellent, essential...