I see on the BBC news that AFC Bournemouth have signed Alex Toth, who turns out to be a promising young Hungarian midfielder who might fill the gap in the Cherries' ranks left by star player Antoine Semenyo upping and leaving for the higher wages of Manchester City. I just hope it leads to a lot of people searching for details of Alex Toth on the internet and learning all about the great American comic book artist of the same name.
Actually, Alex Toth the artist died in 2006, and Alex Toth the footballer is apparently twenty years old... no, disappointingly, their lives did overlap a little, so it's probably not a case of reincarnation, but it comes pretty close. It's still a good excuse to write a blog about some little-known comics, so let's explore the world of Sierra Smith, Western Detective!
Sierra made his debut in the first issue of Dale Evans Comics, published in June 1948:
If you're wondering who Dale Evans is, you're probably not reading this in the year 1948 - Roy Rogers was a really big name, a mega-celebrity and very much the kind of superstar whose merchandise kids would eagerly spend their post-war pocket money on. A licensed Roy Rogers comic had been published by Dell since 1947, and was selling like hot cakes. DC Comics felt they'd missed the boat quite badly there, in their quest to find something new to replace the increasingly unpopular superheroes that had made them into the leading comics publisher of the early 1940s. So because they couldn't get Roy Rogers (and Trigger the horse presumably demanded too high a fee), they signed the next-best thing - Roy's celebrity wife, Dale Evans, Queen of the Westerns!
This comic was a bi-monthly, and every issue contained three comic adventures of Dale (in which her life as a celebrity movie star was continually interrupted by real-life cowboy adventures involving bank robberies and the like for her to thwart), friendly updates on her life (which, unlike the comic stories, were allowed to mention her husband and family), other filler stuff of the type that filled all anthology comics back then, and one backup strip - our hero, Sierra Smith.
Sierra is a noir detective, who lives in the modern-day wild west. It's written by Joe Millard, and drawn by Alex Toth (the artist, who will at that time have been about the same age that the Bournemouth-bound Hungarian footballer is now). It's a strange mix, but he's very much the character archetype. He's a hard-boiled detective, good with his fists, perpetually cynical, perpetually short of money, perpetually aggravating his secretary and girlfriend Nan, and always getting the job done in the end.
His investigations involve a lot of abandoned gold mines, interspersed with an occasional bank robbery. They follow the standard comic formula of the time - Sierra always uncovers the villain's evil scheme, investigates, gets knocked out and captured, escapes, thwarts the evil-doers and sometimes even gets paid (though he tends to squander the money on solving the crime and Nan complains about how he expects them to eat tonight). They're actually great fun, if you're in the mood!
The first story involves a bit of good old-fashioned cross-dressing, too...
And a year later, in Dale Evans Comics #7, Dale herself encounters the same kind of thing. One can only speculate whether she personally approved of this kind of fun, and whether she and Roy (and Trigger) indulged in the same kind of merriment behind closed doors:
The beauty contest for cowboys, if you were wondering, was organised by a man who wanted to rob the bank, and knew if the cowboys were all wearing long skirts and no guns, they wouldn't be able to stop him. But Dale sorts him out in the end, don't worry.
Millard and Toth only remained on Sierra Smith for the first eleven adventures, but I heartily recommend checking them out! It's one of those lost classics of late-forties American comic history, and I just hope Bournemouth's new midfielder can produce the same kind of entertainment!
