When I started doing
the Batman Animated style, I did look at lot of his model sheets from
Hanna-Barbera, and they weren’t very helpful to me. When I really started looking
at them I realized that even in his simplified animation drawings some of the
characters would be really stylized and cartoony, but his human being figures
are just like his comic book figures. They’ve got so many subtleties to them.
He didn’t exaggerate. His animation models really aren’t made for animation.
Everybody may think they are, and he may have thought so, and animation
historians may look back with fond memories on the Alex Toth-designed
Hanna-Barbera shows, but there’s a whole lot of subtleties in those shapes.
Space Ghost’s head is a tricky shape to draw. It’s not a
straight-against-curve, it’s a whole lot of curves that intersect, and if you
get one of them off, he doesn’t look like Space Ghost. So I don’t consider Toth
a huge influence in that respect. Obviously, the overall feel of my Batman kind
of has some of that Space Ghost type of feel, but it wasn’t like I had Space
Ghost designs out when I did it. It was kind of like me remembering what Space
Ghost felt like. I would be a better artist if I were more influenced by Alex
Toth. I wish I had one-tenth of his knowledge and talent, but I don’t.
-
Bruce Timm about Alex Toth’s Space Ghost
