DARIN COUNTY FREE LIBRARY

31111009754266

COMI C BOOK AR TI
RONOOUUBT
'\

fiiJ
r

TV

CENTER

CMC

3 1111 00975 4266

DATE DUE
1 2
12

JAN

fen

138S

nn .

^MHUP

1 6 1987

ri

_l

ZZ^ZJ$Z^
L iir^-JUW

SEP

19flf

~T~~^

2 3 1987

Stjf^^Z^LOJM

FEB

i/Uli

iboti

[llfly jH_1988

DEC

1 2 1988

StH

5 1389

jyp

19.Q B

";

_P

31

9 9Q
NOV 3
JUN o 7 1991^

-gtinr

NOV

n 2801

\raa

mass

mm

bgxdb

mnm

smtm
iiuj aujiAit/

m*

jiUiWJJ's

mm

'

lii'J

lo&L

THE GREAT COMIC BOOK

Copyright

Printed in the United States of America.

reproduced

in

No

All rights reserved.

part of this

book may be used or

any manner whatsoever without written permission except

case of brief quotations embodied

address

ARTISTS.

1986 by Ron Goulart.

St. Martin's Press,

in critical articles

175

Fifth

Avenue,

Editor Stuart

New

York, N.Y. 10010.

Moore

Production Editors: Victor Guerra, Amit Shah

Design by Paolo Pepe

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Goulart, Ron,

The

1.

great

1933comic book

Comic books,

artists.

strips, etc.

History and criticism. 2.

Bibliography.

United States
States

Bibliography.

PN6725.G63 1986
ISBN 0-312-34557-7

I.

United States

Comic books,
3.

strips, etc.

Title.

741.5'092'2 [B]

First Edition

10

United

Cartoonists

(pbk.)

987654321

IV

in

the

or reviews. For information,

86-3711

Acknowledgments
A

tip

of the slouch hat to Jerry

Jerry DeFuccio,

Bails,

Mike Barson,

Don and Maggie Thompson, Bruce

Hamilton of Another Rainbow, Russ Cochran, and Steve

Saffel of Marvel Comics. All of

Great Comic

them are

Book Mauens.

Contents
Harvey Kurtzman

62

Joe Maneely

64

Jesse Marsh

66

Matt Baker

Sheldon Mayer

68

Carl Barks

Mort Meskin

70

Dan Barry

Frank Miller

72

Beck

10

Bob Montana

74

Charles Biro

12

Klaus Nordling

76

Dick Briefer

14

George Perez

78

John Buscema

16

Wendy

Pini

80

John Byrne

18

Bob Powell

82

George Carlson

20

Mac Raboy

84

Howard Chaykin

22

Jerry Robinson

86

Gene Colan

24

John Romita,

Sr.

88

Jack Cole

26

Alex Schomburg

90

Reed Crandall

28

John Severin

92

Jack Davis

30

Joe Shuster

94

Steve Ditko

32

Bill

Sienkewicz

96

Will Eisner

34

Walt Simonson

98

Lee

Elias

36

John Stanley

100

George Evans

38

James Steranko

102

40

Frank

Lou Fine

42

Alex Toth

106

Frank Frazetta

44

George Tuska

108

Fred Guardineer

46

Ed Wheelan

110

Paul Gustavson

48

Al Williamson

112

Bob Kane

50

Barry Windsor-Smith

114

52

Basil

Wolverton

116

Walt Kelly

54

Wally

Jack Kirby

56

Berni Wrightson

120

Bernard Krigstein

58

Joe Kubert

60

Bibliography

123

Introduction

Neal

C. C.

Bill

Gil

Adams

Everett

Kane

VI

Thome

Wood

104

118

^na

mm mm mi wmm

Introduction
Up until 1935 only a handful of people in America
would have been able to list their occupation as comic
book artist. There were Vic Pazmino, doing filler pages
Funnies; Norman Marsh,
who'd turned out one issue of Detective Dan in 1933;
and Boody Rogers and Tack Knight, who'd contributed
to the ill-fated The Funnies back in 1929 and 1930. A
dapper ex-cavalry officer named Malcolm WheelerNicholson changed that when, with considerable enthusiasm and not much cash, he launched New Fun early
in 1935. He followed it toward the end of that year with
New and from then on there was an original material
comic book industry, albeit a shaky one. The major recruited to his staff struggling art school students, downon-their-luck pulp magazine illustrators, alcoholic newsfor the pioneering

Famous

paper cartoonists, and others who hoped to earn a few

bucks in that grim Depression year.
The history of the rise and growth of the comic book
is not our subject. Suffice it to say that in the years since
Major Nicholson set up shop down on Fourth Avenue
in Manhattan, the field has grown considerably and
that hundreds of men and a few dozen women have
worked as comic book artists. Today you can even buy

books on how

to

be one or take a college course on the

subject.

The Great Comic Book Artists

about three score of

art. Artists from
every decade since the thirties are to be found here,
along with biographical material and samples of their
work. At the end of the book you'll find a bibliography
with suggestions on how to collect their work
is

the best practitioners of graphic story

economically, whenever possible.

Keep

in

mind that

person's great

may

"great"

is

a tricky

word and that one

well be another's lousy. Also, there

were a few great comic book artists who couldn't draw

very well. For details on this seeming paradox, consult
the biographies that follow. I've tried to produce a balanced book, but must admit slipped in a few highly
1

subjective choices.
If

you don't

one or two of your own

find

remember

favorites

we

could only fit sixty candidates

into this present volume. Be patient and it's possible
you'll eventually see The Great Comic Book Artists II
here,

Until then.

that

Ron Goulart

Neal
Adams began

to shake up
work for DC after five
years as the artist on the Ben Casey newspaper strip, he
was soon impressing comic book readers and editors
alike with his innovative layouts and grandstanding
drawing style. Ben Casey, based on the popular TV
hospital melodrama, had begun in 1962. Although he
was only twenty-one at the time, Adams felt confident.
"It was a very popular strip and sold as well as any other
realistic strip at the time and better than most," he's said.
"The reason for that was that added things to it that
went above and beyond the soap opera aspect of it.
One of the things added was that told a story every
It

was

in

the late 1960s that

the comic

book

field.

Going

to

day, in three panels."

What Adams brought to funnybooks, just as they

into a more realistic and socially aware

were moving

phase, was the slick realism of newspaper story strips

art. He had a sophisticated, bravura
somewhat reminiscent of the sort of thing Stan
Drake and Lou Fine were doing at the time. When it
came to laying out a story, though, Adams was much
more unconventional than the competition. His panels
sliced pages up in unexpected ways, his long and medium shots favored unusual angles and perspectives,
and his close-ups rarely showed his heroes striking a
handsome pose. The work was both slick and gritty,
sort of soap opera with warts. Of the impact he had,
Adams says, "It was strange because nobody at that
time expected somebody to show up with so many
new ideas or what seemed like new ideas. took everybody by surprise.
My entrance into the field caused
a lot of uproar and mixed up even more a bowl that
had already been mixed by Jack Kirby and other people, and just caused it to go crazier."

and advertising

style,

Adams

first

attracted attention with the

Deadman

which he started drawing in DCs Strange

Adventures in 1967. This red-clad, white-hued hero
earned his name the hard way, by being murdered while
performing his circus trapeze act. Despite the impressive
artwork, Deadman was not a hit and he left the magazine in 1969. Next Adams worked on the Spectre, DCs
original deadman superhero. After that he took a rum
with Batman. "He brought back something sadly lacking
character,

Adams
Batman's character," says Comics Journal,

in

"that

sense of the mysterious, the eerie, the supernatural

which was

an

originally

sader's mystique.

caped cruBatman's cape length-

integral part of the

Visually, the

ened, draping over the crimebuster's shoulders like

Dracula's cloak. His face and mask were continually

submerged
still

in

shadow.

often depicted in the

Teaming up with

Even today, the character

Adams

writer

Denny

is

style."

O'Neil,

Adams

then

guided long-time hero Green Lantern through the "relevance" period of his career. The Green Lantern, working
with the Green Arrows who was updated to look somewhat like an aging, and well-groomed, hippy tackled
social problems such as pollution, overpopulation,

women's rights, racial prejudice, drugs, and political corruption. Adams, something of a social crusader himself,
was obviously inspired by this sort of material and put
a good deal of work into the stories. Despite the good
intentions of DC and the handsome packaging of the
messages, the Green Lantern title failed to succeed and
was cancelled in the spring of 1972. Writing of this
period in GL's career, O'Neil quotes editor Julius
Schwartz as saying that it was "a success and a failure.
Personally, yes, a great success. Plenty of publicity, no
extra sales." When the magazine was revived in 1976, it

was studiously

Adams

irrelevant.

moved

and out of comics ever since,

and illustration work. He's
drawn for Marvel, DC, and the alternate publishers. In
1982, for instance, he began Ms. Mystic for Pacific Comics
"An ecological superheroine. I think there are more
problems on Earth than bank robbers, and if you want
to deal with an Earth that bears some semblance to
reality, you must recognize the problems of today. One
of the problems is that we're screwing up our planet.
This is a character who, in an exaggerated form, fights
for Earth." Her career, like that of other of the restless
Adams's creations, has been erratic. Among his other
recent comic book projects are Echo of Futu repast and
Zero Patrol.
He doesn't see himself as simply an illustrator or an
has

in

alternating with advertising

artist. "I

think of myself," he says, "as a storyteller

uses drawing."

who

The X-Men

Tom

in

a dramatic moment, courtesy Neal Adams. Script by

Palmer. (Copyright

1969 Marvel Comics Group.)

Roy Thomas,

inks by

Matt Baker
Baker was not an artist of wide-ranging abilities. What
he drew best was pretty women. He was, in fact, one of
the leading practitioners of what's come to be called
"Good Girl Art." In the years he spent in comics he drew
every sort of attractive female from Phantom Lady to
Loma Doone. Much admired and much imitated, he
was sort of the Vargas of comic books.
One of the few blacks to work in the field, Baker
started his career at the Iger shop in 1944. He was in
his early twenties and Iger describes him as being
"handsome and nattily dressed." According to Iger,
Baker's "only sample was a color sketch of (naturally)
a beautiful gal! On the strength of that, and a nod from
my associate editor Ruth Roche, he was hired as a
background artist. It didn't take long for Mr. Baker to
develop.
His drawing was superb. His women were
.

the fall of 1941 in the pages of Police

Comics. In 1947 Fox got his hands on the character and
she began appearing in a magazine of her own. The
move changed her somewhat. Her costume became
even skimpier and her bosom grew impressively larger.
She also developed a marked fondness for being tied up
and chained, especially on covers.
Although the Phantom Lady lasted less than two
years in her Fox incarnation, she made a lasting impression. Baker's boyishly enthusiastic pinup artwork is one
of the reasons, as are the elements pointed out in The
tively sedate, in

Comic Book
bondage

Price Guide

cover," etc. Dr. Frederic

#Y1 and captioned

'headlights'

who could draw pretty women as well as

demand, so much so that, according to
some who knew him, he overworked himself. He was
not yet forty when he died.
The major purveyors of Good Girl Art in the forties
were Fiction House and Fox. Baker's pages, rich with his
patented brand of slim, large-breasted and long-legged
heroine, appeared frequently in titles of both companies.
He was especially good with jungle girls who went in for
skimpy animal-skin outfits Tiger Girl in Fight Comics,
Camilla in Jungle, etc. It was for Victor Fox's somewhat
sleazy company that Baker drew his most famous char-

years.

An

artist

Baker was

in

acter,

Phantom Lady. She'd

first

appeared, looking

rela-

im-

1954 study

of

the negative effects of comics, Seduction of the Innocent, he reprinted Baker's cover from Phantom Lady

Baker had come along as comics were moving into

new areas. Stimulated by impressive wartime sales to an
audience that had been swollen by the addition of thousands and thousands of GIs older and raunchier than
earlier readers
many publishers beefed up their product. Those old standbys, sex and violence, proliferated.
In the years immediately after World War II, true crime
and horror comics, all decorated with sexy women, continued to flourish. Superheroes floundered in those

cover," "classic

Wertham was

pressed, too, though not favorably. In his

gorgeous!"

"negligee

it,

"Sexual stimulation by combining

with the sadist's dream of tying up a

woman." The doctor's comment has had the unintended

effect of making this the most expensive issue of the
eleven Baker was associated with. It's worth as much as
$850 today.
Since Iger's shop provided art for the Gilberton company, Baker even got to draw an issue of Classics Illustrated. He didn't get completely away from pretty girls,
since the novel he adapted was Loma Doone. That
appeared as # 32 (December, 1946) and showed that
Baker could draw other things than sexy girls.
As the pressures on comics to clean up their act increased, Baker had fewer opportunities to practice his
specialty. He drew Westerns, war stories, true crime, and
romance in the early 1950s, tried his hand at Lassie in
the middle 1950s, and did more Westerns in the late
1950s, this time for Marvel. There has been some disagreement as to when Baker died, the most common
date given being 1956. Recently, however, Vince Colleta,
in whose studio he was working at the time of his death,
has stated that the year was 1962. He also added that
Baker was "one of the snappiest dressers ever knew."
I

Good

Girl Art at its best in this Tiger Girl page. Although a pinup, she spoke
impressive Shakespearean manner. (Copyright
1948 Fiction House, Inc.)

in

an


Carl Barks
The Great Unknown during his active years in comics,
Barks remained uncredited and vitually unheralded until

Known

after

he

some

variation thereof, to

retired.

ing out his

only as "the

Good

Artist,"

or

he worked at turninimitable Donald Duck stories from 1942

into the 1960s.

most

fans,

He was a one-man band, writing, pencill-

he quit being the

Duckburg he has become increasingly well-known. Today Barks is internationally acknowledged as one of the handful of geniuses produced
by comic books during their first half-century. "A genius
of the first rank," Nemo magazine has called him,
"wholly American in his self-effacing production."
Barks was bom in the wilds of eastern Oregon in
ing,

and

inking. In the years since

chronicler of

life

in

1901. "How
came to be a cartoonist is as much a
mystery to me as it would be to anybody else," he's
admitted. "I have no cartoonists in my ancestral tree
whatsoever, no artists that I know of, no writers that I
know of." But "by the time I was sixteen, I had become
pretty well assured that I wanted to be an artist or a
cartoonist." Before attaining his goal, however, "I had to
go out and be a cowhand and a farmer, a muleskinner,
lumberjack, anything that happened to come along that
would furnish me with a living. I'd worked in a printing
shop, been a cowboy and a whole bunch of other things,
with practically no success whatever."
Not until the late 1920s did he begin to sell his cartoons "I didn't try The New Yorker or the ones who
were paying high prices because every cartoonist that
free-lanced at all was already crowding that market."
Aiming a mite lower, Barks hit Judge and College
Humor. He was even more successful with markets that
went in for what then would have been labeled risque
material. His gags, built around well-built ladies in varying states of undress, found favor with a publication
called The Calgary Eye-Opener. In 1931 the Minneapolis-based magazine offered him a staff job
"just sort of
I

a handy gag

man around

the office"

$110 a month. By 1935

salary of

at the

handsome

"the wages were get-

by the hour," and Barks decided to apply for

a job with the Walt Disney studios out in California. His
samples prompted an offer to try out, at $20 per week,
as an in-betweener in the Southern California animation
works. "I went out there on a wild gamble that could
ting smaller

make

it."

He made

but not exactly as an artist. "I don't think

finished the period of training before
got fired," he's said, "but turned in so many gags to
the comic strip department and the story department
it,

would ever have

that

got put

in

on a permanent
seven years there Barks de-

the story department

basis." After serving nearly

cided to leave Disney and settle in the desert country. "I

if I could get out there to this ranch and

was thinking that

raise chickens to make money, in my spare time I could

develop a character of my own a sort of Superman or
one of those things. I'd thought of doing something with
human types of characters and I wanted to see if I could
develop something along that line." It was ducks, not

chickens, that were to

Barks'

fill

the next twenty-five years of

life.

Before leaving Disney he'd worked on a one-shot

comic book titled Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold.
Based on an abandoned movie, this was the first original Donald Duck comic book ever done. "I did part of
the drawing only," explains Barks about the 1942 magazine. "The other pages were by Jack Hannah. Bob
Karp did the script." Late in 1942 Barks learned that
Dell-Western was looking for people to do original tenpage stories to add to Walt Disney's Comics & Stories.
He got the job and his first work appeared in # 31
(April, 1943). Fairly soon he was writing as well as
drawing the adventures. The character of Donald
changed as Barks began to think of him as his own.
"Instead of making just a quarrelsome little guy out of
him,
made a sympathetic character. He was sometimes a villain, and he was often a real good guy and at
all times he was just a blundering person like the average human being." The three diminutive nephews
changed, too. "I broadened them like
did Donald,
started out with mischievous little guys and ended up
with little scientists, you might say."
Barks took on full-length Donald books in 1943 as
well. It was in these
The Mummy's Ring, Frozen Gold,
Volcano Valley, etc. that he really came into his own.
With room to swing, he began creating graphic novels
full of adventure, comedy, satire, and some of the best
cartooning to be found in comics. Nineteen forty-seven
saw the publication of Christmas on Bear Mountain and
the introduction of Barks's major creation, Uncle
I

Scrooge.
Barks retired at the age of

sixty-five and devoted

Donald and the nephews,
along with his own Scrooge, Gyro Gearloose, Gladstone Gander, and the villainous Beagle Boys to
other, less gifted, hands. His work has been continuously reprinted since then. Even his own publishers
after
eventually got around to acknowledging him
fans from just about everywhere had been writing
about and extolling him for years and in some 1974
trade paperback reprints they mentioned him by name
in the introductions, pointing out that his work is
"cherished by comic book fans throughout the world."

himself to painting.

He

left

Ducks, Beagle Boys, and a nice demonstration of Barks'

Walt Disney Company.)

skills.

(Copyright

1986 The

Dan Barry
One

of the dominant styles of the decade following the

Second World War was that of Dan Barry. He flourished
in the years during which comic books were expanding
into

new

categories

realistic

adventure, true crime, ro-

mance, Western, sophisticated fantasy. Although he did

excellent work on superheroes and cowboys, his major
strength was in drawing plainclothes heroes. His style
blended the figure work of Alex Raymond and the lush
inking and realistic backgrounds of Milton Caniff with
considerable input of his own. Barry brought a slickness
to comic books that would have been out of place a few
years earlier.

Bom in New Jersey in

1923, he began in comics while

a protege of artist-novelist
George Mandel and teamed up with George's brother
Alan Mandel on some of his earliest jobs usually using
in

his late teens.

He was

pen name Emby. When, after three years in the

air force, he returned to comic books in 1946, his style
had matured considerably.
For Hillman's Airboy he drew the title character, ably
rendering both the aircraft and the pretty women required, and that walking compost pile and precursor of
Swamp Thing, the Heap. At Fawcett Barry took a turn
the joint

Commando Yank in Wow Comics. He also turned

out quite a few adventure yarns, ranging from pirate
tales to stories of mountain climbing in Tibet, for the
comic magazines that were given away in the Buster

with

Brown shoe

stores.

For the Lev Gleason titles Barry worked on both

costumed heroes the original Daredevil and Crime-

and on gangster

buster

At

stuff for

Crime Does Not Pay.

1940s, editor-writer Charles

Biro was moving Daredevil and Crimebuster away
from derring-do and into social problem areas juvenile delinquency, etc.
and Barry's developing style,
with its well-documented realism, was well suited to the
this point, in the late

new

direction.

His most impressive work in the costumed hero department was done for DC at about the same time. For

Adventure he drew Johnny Quick, the roadshow Flash,

and for Action he took over Vigilante, the cowboy crimebuster. This latter feature was sometimes urban and
sometimes rural and Barry did it all well, drawing motorcycles and mustangs with equal ease. He had, by now,
also developed a distinctive style of pretty girl.
Gang Busters, the true-crime radio show whose machine-guns-and-sirens opening gave the phrase "Coming on like Gang Busters" to the language, first took to
the air in the middle 1930s; it remained on until the late
1950s and was adapted to several other media. In 1947
DC took over the comic book version and Barry was the
star of the early issues, drawing covers and the opening
story. Since DCs approach to crime was never as violent
or explicit as that of Gleason and many of their other

work in Gang Busters is a bit more

was elsewhere. As DC continued to branch
out, Barry took on new chores. He drew the first issue
of A/an Ladd and the early issues of Big Town, another
radio crime show adaptation.
It was in the postwar years that several comic book
artists graduated to newspaper strips
Mac Raboy,
John Lehti, Paul Norris, etc. Barry drew his first syndicated strip in 1948, when he was given the Tarzan
daily. This was not an especially lucrative assignment
and he stayed with it less than a year, improving the
apeman's looks appreciably before he departed. The
Flash Gordon daily was revived in 1951 and Barry got
the job, one he's kept, more or less, ever since. This
was not Raymond's light opera Flash, but a hero with
whom reality had to some extent caught up. While the
emphasis was on adventure, the continuities were like
the sort of thing being done in the latest science fiction
stories and novels. Barry's most impressive work was
done on the initial years of Flash Gordon; a growing
interest in painting caused him eventually to farm out
much of the work on the strip. Today he shares the
credit on the daily and Sunday with Bob Fujitani, another comic book vet, and his hand is no longer evident.
competitors, Barry's

sedate than

it

a Th

STROKl Of LUCK THt ^4^

PASSES

THE DEVILFISH'S EYES -MS ONt WEAK SPOT

HiTH PAIS THE OCTOPUS DESCENDS

H* ADVANTAGE. THE HEAP &TEi> DEEP INTO

DRAWING THE BLOOD OF THE 3&A-OEMON*..
AN fNXY 5U96TANCE BLURS THB WATER... ASC then A
RED FLOW., THE Sk$N Of THE BATTLtS END--...

KJBSUIN6

TVf WOUftO,

THE HEAP HAS BROKEN THE EVIL

5PELL OVER OUR FORBIDDEN
POOL' NOW THE PEARLS CAN B
RESTORED TO TH| ALTAR

4\0 THE E*P E MESSES.. SilCKIHe IS

GOOD CLEAN AIR Of ^' C E ... THE
PRIZE OP THE VICTOR

rE

LET US SEE THAT THE HEAP IS

NEVER IN VSANT Of ZQOP AND
WATER: HE WIU NC T NEED TO
DESTRCv OuR LANDS TO BE FED:

Of PiACi/

AGAIN,

CHEAP

VOU HAVE

SHOWN MAN THAT HIS

PEAR OP >OU COMES FROM
W.THIN THE WARPED
CAVERNS OP HIS OWN
MIND 00 HAVE SURVIVED
THE JUNGLE -AND MOW
VOf MUST 3Q ON TO
MEET THE CHALLENGE OF

OTHER PLACES

Here Barry applies

Hillman Periodicals.

his abilities to that affable monster, the

Inc.)

Heap. (Copyright

1948

'

C. C.

Beck

dedicated curmudgeon who once claimed to be the

model for the extravagantly nasty Sivana, Charles Clarence Beck didn't enter the comic book field until he was
almost thirty. That was late in 1939, when he and editor-

properly,"

writer Bill Parker created the original Captain Marvel.

to read

design an individual version of the approach to be

seen in the work of such Chicago-based cartoonists as
Chester Gould and Harold Gray. "To make comics read

Beck feels, "you have to arrange your speech

from left panel to right panel, and you have to
put your characters in those positions. You don't suddenly have a view from the bottom of a well or through

For good measure Parker invented all the other characWhiz Comics, and Beck drew two more of them
Ibis and Spy Smasher.
Bom in Minnesota in 1910, Beck studied art at the
Chicago Academy of Fine Art. After a varied career,
which included advertising art and painting comic characters like Smitty and Little Orphan Annie on lamp
shades, he went to work for Fawcett Publications. That
was in 1934, when the publishers were still based in
Minnesota. Beck provided cartoons for several humor
magazines, including Smokehouse Monthly and Captain Billy's Whiz Bang. "One guy would work in charcoal, another guy'd do multiline in full color," he has
recalled. "My job was imitating all those styles." Fawcett
eventually moved to New York City and in 1939 decided
ters for

a keyhole, looking at their toes or something. And it

always seemed to me more or less like a Punch and Judy
show, with the two little characters facing each other and
not the audience."
Beck's work can be seen at its best in the first two
dozen issues of Whiz Comics, in material done before
the increasingly popularity of Captain Marvel required
more material than one man could produce. In these
eleven- and twelve-page adventures of the World's
Mightiest Mortal, Beck demonstrates his theories on
how to tell a graphic story as Billy Batson and his burly
alter ego tangle with the snide and diminutive Sivana
(one of the most appealing mad scientists in comics), his
lovely blonde daughter Beautia, and assorted other
crooks, madmen, and monsters. Beck's style was ideally
suited to the fantastic, and not quite serious, exploits of
Captain Marvel. On some of the earlier escapades the
assistance of Pete Costanza, his long-time partner, is in
evidence. But a good deal of the stuff is pure, uncluttered Beck.
He was also responsible for the first complete Captain
Marvel book, Special Edition Comics (1940). Fawcett
farmed out the first issues of Captain Marvel Adventures
to Jack Kirby, George Tuska, and others. Beck eventually had a hand in the title, but his major contribution
was the covers. He also drew a majority of the Whiz
covers, exhibiting a strong poster sense. One of the reasons for the significant sales of Captain Marvel titles was
certainly the effective packaging Beck provided.
He stayed with his creation until Fawcett shut down
comic operations in 1953. When the character was
revived by DC twenty years later, Beck was persuaded to
return. He contributed to ten issues before a falling-out

comic book business. Beck was the man the

higher-ups picked to try his hand at drawing a competitor for the now impressively thriving Superman. The
to enter the

result was Captain Marvel. Realizing that a fairly close

approximation of the Man of Steel, in appearance at any
rate, was what was wanted, "we proceeded to give them
a character that looked somewhat like Superman, but in
character was entirely different, and of course none of
the big shots ever read it, so they were happy in their
ignorance. They put it out and the public grabbed it right
away, because it was different. And it was good."
Beck, who has often expressed a lack of enthusiasm
for the entire comic book industry, has the distinction of
having drawn the most successful superhero of the
1940s. He maintains, however, that Captain Marvel outsold Superman, Batman, and the rest not because of his
artwork but because of superior scripts. "It was the
story," he's said, "and my belief is that readers only
looked at the pictures out of the comers of their eyes."
Be that as it may, Beck devoted considerable thought to
how to best illustrate the adventures of the Big Red
Cheese. "The basis go on is never put in a single line
that isn't necessary. Don't try to show off," he's explained, adding, "You don't throw in anything. You cut
your backgrounds down to symbols."
Beck's style was a blend of the illustrative and the

occurred.

were

cartoony, with attention paid to simplicity,

clarity,

He

dull, boring,

work
little

just

10

"The

original stories

and

childish." He's

DCs were
done no comic book

since and, as a result of a recent stroke, does very

drawing

at

all.

He

lives,

as he has for

many years,

in

and sums up his career by saying, "I'm really

a commercial illustrator and always have been."

Florida,

and

didn't like the scripts.

exciting, varied, professionally handled.

nicely designed page, featuring both "that big

(Copyright

1941

Fawcett Publications,

Inc.)

lump

of muscle"

and

his favorite foe.

Charles Biro

He was

not exactly a great

artist, at least

academic sense. But what he lacked

Biro

made up for in

packager of

not

in

strict

ics,"

in technical skills

and audacity. A terrific

he devised numerous ways to

$100

inventiveness

his material,

in

those lean early years, Chesler

ation, guiding the likes of

Jack Cole,

Gill

managed

unfold within these pages!

your doors well for

YOU!" He was

Ken

originally

to

Ernst,

Biro moved over to MLJ and ran things on Pep Comics,

Top-Notch, and the rest of that house's pre-Archie titles.
at

MLJ that Biro, as artist, writer, and editor,

What he developed

next was a blend of action, violence,

bloodshed, and slinky sex.

and lock

strike at

even

also great at teasing the customers.

The Case of the Mysterious Trunk was

announced for # 5 but didn't show up until # 7.

more freedom it also, eventually, encouraged the

came close to crippling the industry in
1950s. The covers, Biro's only art contribution to

who

magazine, went

actually a reanimated mummy. Unlike many of his

do-gooder contemporaries, DD was not above sharing a
glass of wine and a warm embrace with a lovely lady.
Besides exploiting the blend of sex and violence that
was an MLJ hallmark, Biro added packaging tricks that
first

the lights

cesses that

was

its

So dim

Biro's major creation at MLJ was Steel Sterling, which

began in Zip Comics # 1 (February, 1940). Biro's anatomy was shaky, as was his grasp of perspective, but he
had a strong sense of action. His early pages, though
often crudely drawn, have movement and life. When he
began working for the Lev Gleason outfit, Biro came
into his own. He took over the original Daredevil
created for Silver Streak Comics by Jack Binder and
improved upon by Jack Cole and when DD got his
own magazine in 1941, Biro was one of its editors. He
also drew the character. In his first Daredevil yam, Biro

became standard for the field. From

Daredevil bore the slogan, "The Greatest

...

monster might

his interest in cute "bigfoot" cartooning.

pitted his crimson-and-blue hero against a sexy lady

this

In # 5 Biro explained, "Due to a serious event, it is unwise for me to present 'The Case of the Mysterious
Trunk' this month as promised."
Biro's next invention was Boy Comics, which debuted
in the spring of 1942. The idea here was "a boy hero in
every strip!!" This new magazine, coedited with Bob
Wood, was announced with typical Biro flair. "Ready at
last! The million dollar comic magazine! Two years in
the making! Produced behind closed doors in utmost
secrecy!" The star feature was Crimebuster, drawn by
Biro. The lad tangled with some foul villains, especially
Iron Jaw, a Nazi agent who had the lower half of his face
replaced by metal. Iron Jaw was given to remarks like,
"Why can't the FOOLS realize that we are the superior
race!! They must and they will ... if I have to kill every
last one of them! I SWEAR IT!!" Biro also stuck compelling blurbs on his Boy covers
"First Torture, Then
DEATH! With 130,000,000 Lives At Stake! Can
CRIMEBUSTER Squelch This Foul Jap Treachery?"
Close on the heels of Boy came Biro's prime creation,
Crime Does Not Pay. While not the first true crime
comic book McKay had published a Gang Busters
one-shot, based on the radio show, as early as 1938
Crime Does Not Pay was the first one to gain impressive
sales. The advent of World War II had added an enormous number of comic book readers, GIs who favored
not only superheroes but more adult material. To cater
to this audience Biro broke through the implied barriers
that had existed up until then. While this allowed for

Carl Burgos, and Jack Binder. After leaving Chesler,

It was while
abandoned

be found

story entitled

of the oper-

Fox,

money

sorts of delights, including

developed the habit early on of addressing

hyping the story that was
about to unfold. "None can rival the wild fantasy that will

Even though there weren't many comic books being

and Biro soon became the supervisor

all

CASH PRIZES You May WINto

his readers directly, often

thrive

promising

within. Biro

hook the reader. He possessed, in addition to a pretty

good knack for storytelling, the skills of an advertising
agency art director and a carnival barker. Starting out as
a humorous cartoonist in the middle 1930s, he switched
to superheroes in the wake of Superman and then
moved on to a brutal sort of realism. An important figure
The World Encyclopedia
in the history of comic books
somewhat
extravagantly, "the finest
calls
him,
Comics
of
Biro cooked up foreditor and writer" of the 1940s
mats and techniques that influenced the entire industry
and are still in evidence.
Biro was bom in 191 1, in New York, which made him
a few years older than most of the young artists and
writers who entered the comic book field in the thirties.
In 1936 he went to work for the enterprising Harry "A"
Chesler, who owned the very first sweat shop devoted to
producing art and editorial material for comic books.
published

and there were boxes of copy and multicolor head-

lines

drawings, and

in for bright

and basic

ex-

the
the

colors, violent

lots of hard-sell copy.

Mellowing, Biro eventually dropped the villains from
Boy and Daredevil and began attacking juvenile delinquincy and other social problems. He even tried, in the
early 1950s,' a kiddie comic called Uncle Charlie's Fa
bles. He went to work for NBC as a graphic artist in
1962 and remained there until his death ten years later.

issue

Name In Com-

12

AermNTf

A REPTILE WILL NOT OE FOR

A LONG TIME, EVEN F CUT
INTO MANY PIECES! SO IT IS

WITH THE MOST DEADLY

VILLAIN OF ALL TIME!

typical hard-selling Biro cover, as

Comic House,

Inc.)

STORY OF

TMCM

compelling as a movie poster. (Copyright

ALL!

1943

Dick Briefer
A man with a strong, though somewhat perverse,
sense of humor, Briefer apparently soon tired of doing
all the ghastly stuff straight. By the middle 1940s he had
converted Frankenstein to a comedy feature. He kidded
the whole horror genre, made fun of contemporary fads
and foibles such as crooners and quiz shows. The mon-

His specialty was monsters, both horrifying and whimsical.

And

he's best

remembered

for the nearly fifteen

years he devoted to drawing everybody's favorite: the

Frankenstein monster.
Although Briefer studied at Manhattan's Art Students
League, he had originally intended to be a doctor. "NYU

me on that," he once explained, "so

was Eisner and Iger's gain." He went to work
shop in 1937 and in the following year his first

soon became the

star of Prize

and

1945 began

didn't agree with

ster

their loss

appearing in a bimonthly of his own. Briefer afterwards

admitted that the humorous Frankenstein was the favorite of all his comic book work. "I look back into the old
comic mags of Frankenstein, " he said, "and really marvel at most of the art and ideas and scripts that I turned

in their

monster appeared

in

the tabloid-size pages of

Jumbo

"suggested
Comics. His Hunchback of Notre Dame
by Victor Hugo's great classic" was a clumsy effort and
owed more to Lon Chaney's silent movie version than
it did to the novel. But it was a start for Briefer and the
next time he borrowed from the movies he fared much

out."

The

forties

was a busy decade

He drew The
who specialized

for him.

Pirate Prince, about a liberal buccaneer

preying on slave traders and freeing their captives, for

and then for Daredevil from 1941 to 1945.
He also did Real American #1 for Daredevil. It was one
of the few strips ever to feature an American Indian as
a costumed crimefighter. In Boy Comics he was represented by Yankee Longago, a kid who traveled through
in

better.

though, Briefer drew plenty of monsters, mostly

of an extraterrestrial nature. Commencing with Mystery

Silver Streak

First,

Men Comics # 1

(August, 1939), he drew Rex Dexter of

The alien creatures that blond Rex and his sweetheart Cynde encountered were mostly of the "hideous,
blood-freezing" sort. So were those tangled with by Flint

Mars.

Baker over

in

time.

Under the pen name of Dick Floyd, he drew Pinky

Rankin for the American Communist Party's newspaper
The Daily Worker. An adventure strip with "a
proletarian hero who took part in the struggle against
the Nazis as an underground fighter in the occupied
countries of Europe," it ran from 1942 until after the end
of the Second World War. Some feel that Briefer's association with this particular project may have contributed
to his leaving comics in the conservative 1950s.
The humorous Frankenstein ended in the late 1940s,
but the character came back in the early 1950s in a new,
grim version. Briefer's heart didn't seem to be in it. After
comic books he worked at commercial art and then

Planet Comics. In the very first issue (January, 1940), for example, Baker came face to face with
the one-eyed monster men of Mars. Briefer stuck with
Flint for only five months, but drew Rex's interplanetary
adventures for nearly two years. He also did one episode
of the Human Top, a superhero with the dubious ability
of being able to spin around real fast, for Marvel's Red
Raven Comics. In later years he had no recollection of
this whirligig crimebuster at all.
By the time Briefer introduced the Frankenstein monster in the seventh issue of Prize Comics (December,
1939), there had been three highly successful Frankenstein movies, each starring Boris Karloff. Briefer was
obviously thinking of the actor when he created his version. Since the novel was public domain and Karloff
wasn't, he was careful to state at the start of each comic
book episode that it was "suggested by the classic of
Mary Shelley." Updating the story, he gave it a contemporary American setting and showed his hulking, deadwhite monster rampaging in streamlined urban settings.
Within a few months Briefer began calling the monster
in

Frankenstein, explaining, "the

name

is

portrait painting until his death in the early 1980s.

He was a unique artist, one who most likely couldn't

have found work at a later period. He was basically
not an illustrator, but a cartoonist, a man with his own
individual graphic shorthand for telling his stories.
At his worst, his pages looked sloppy and hurried.
But at his best, there was a grace and a liveliness to
his stuff that made it fun to look at and read. His
own appraisal of his work was quite accurate: "Most

universally ac-

cepted to be that of the ghastly creation."

of the art

14

was

excellent, carefully but loosely done."

Briefer's
style.

humorous

(Copyright

version of the Frankenstein monster

1947 Feature

Publications. Inc.)

drawn

in his loose,

compelling

John Buscema
accumulating a cult following all its own." He also drew
the Robert E. Howard character frequently in Savage
Sword of Conan, the black-and-white comic that commenced in 1974. Buscema was enthusiastic about this
phase of his career. "I love the character," he once said.
"I think it's a great character. I love the stories, I love the

Buscema worked

at Marvel in the late 1940s and for

most of the 1950s without attracting undue attention.
He returned in 1966 and by the middle 1970s, following
the abdication of Jack Kirby, had become one of Marvel's most popular artists. Primarily a penciller, he drew

almost all the successful characters of the seventies

Captain America, Daredevil, Ka-Zar, X-Men, Ghost
Rider. Fantastic Four, Avengers, and Conan. His style,
integrating elements of Kirby, Gil Kane, and John
Romita. became the Marvel standard for the decade
the house dressing, as it were.
He was bom in 1927, studied at both the High School

Howard stories."
Buscema tried his hand
material in 1979. That

early attempt to invade the pixilated fantasy world of

Wendy

While the feature was not a sucto demonstrate that

he could function effectively in a realm other than that
of the musclemen.
For a few years, he ran the John Buscema Comicbook
Workshop in Manhattan. This led to the publication, in
1978, of How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way, in
which "Buscema graphically illustrates the hitherto mysterious methods of comic art." With text by Stan Lee and
artwork by Buscema, the book has gone into several
editions. In the course of it Lee explains what the Marvel
style and what the Buscema style are. "Action. A Marvel
cess,

and Art and the Pratt Institute, and did his first
comic book work when he was in his early twenties. That
was for Marvel, where he drew crime, horror, mystery,
romance, science fiction, Western, and just about every
other category to be found in the eclectic postwar comics
field. In addition to Marvel, Buscema drew for WhitmanGold Key in the 1950s, pencilling cowboy and Indian
features, including Roy Rogers. He also found employment with Quality, St. John, and Ziff-Davis. For Charlton
he did the odd and short-lived Nature Boy. By the time
he got back to Marvel in the mid-sixties, after a spell in
advertising, the superhero renaissance was underway,
and he devoted much of his time to that genre. "When
went back ... to superheroes," he's said, "it took me
awhile before got the feel of superheroes." Once he got
of Music

though, it was smooth sailing. His earliest assignments included the Hulk, Sub-Mariner, and the Silver Surfer.

1973 he

Pini's Elfquest.

did give

him an opportunity

And

exaggeration "Thrusting the

head farther forward, or spreading the legs farther apart,
can make all the difference in the world." There is also
a particular Marvel-Buscema way of composing panels
and pages. Lee recommends thinking in terms of camera angles, adding, "Some camera angles are more dramatic, more interesting than others." For Buscema this
means tilting your camera, shooting up from the floor or
down from the rafters, zooming in for quirky close-ups.
Recently, Buscema has done some work on Conan,
contributed to Epic, and resumed pencilling Avengers.
If he hasn't been as prolific in the 1980s as he was
earlier in his career, he's still one of Marvel's top artists.

feel,

In

it

specialty!" says Lee.

the

at a somewhat gentler type of

was with Weirdworld, Marvel's

inherited America's best-loved barbarian

when Barry Windsor-Smith left Conan for other things.

"Buscema was expected to generate little excitement,"
says The World Encyclopedia of Comics. "But ... he
drew Conan in a pristine but exciting style that began

16

JUST THN~

OCTAVfA

SCGFA/HSf

John Buscema's muscular Conan prepares to do battle. Script by Roy Thomas,

Alfredo Alcala. (Copyright 1976 Marvel Comics Group.)

inks by

"

"

John Byrne
Man, and The Avengers. By 1980, after winning a number of fan awards, he was drawing Captain America and
X-Men. Looking back on his career in that year, Byrne

little more than a decade as a professional, Byrne

has become one of the most popular artists in comic
books. In 1985 the subscribers of the Comics Buyers
Guide, for example, voted him their favorite artist. And
the two titles he drew and wrote Fantastic Four and

After

Alpha

appeared

What

he's

CBG

on the

Flight

comics.

managed

to

do

is

list

"When started doing comics realized that didn't

have the sense of power that, say, Jack Kirby has, or the
understanding of anatomy that Gil Kane has. So, de-

said,

of favorite

deliver

work

first

to

to

make my work

little

different

try

it

It

was with X-Men

that

Byrne

really rose to

fame

in

comics. His contribution went beyond his pencilling

(meticulously inked by Terry Austin) to a great deal of

Canada.

input into plot and characterization, particularly with

comic books he collected were DCs, especially

regard to the fan-favorite characters Wolverine and

Phoenix. Byrne's collaboration with writer Chris Claremont was hardly seamless, but the energy they both put
into the title made the characters and story lines come

Fantastic Four # 5!" he's

in

recalled. "After that,

my buy-

this same period, Byrne briefly pencilled

Four the very title that hooked him in his
youth and in 1981 he returned to the book as artistwriter. He's done some of his most ambitious and impressive stuff during this latest stint. He's since taken on

changed and I started picking up Spider-Man,

The Avengers, Sgt. Fury. had the first six issues of The

ing habits

alive.

studied at the Alberta College of Art, contributed

comics by

dumb

and

fanzines. "I got into

luck," he's claimed. "I

was

in

a total revamping of comics' greatest legend

man.

the right

work was
done for Charlton, for editor Nick Cuti, in 1974 Rog2000, Space: 1999, and Wheelie and the Chopper
Bunch. Rog-2000 had originally been done for a fanzine. "Cuti saw it. He liked it," Bryne's explained. "He
asked me if wanted to do it as a back-up for E-Man.
And it was the first time anybody had offered me any
place at the right time." His

first

professional

Hulk.
to school publications

During

Fantastic

He

make

I'd try

subtlety."

"anything with Superman in it." Then he came upon

Marvel. "I still remember the first Marvel comic I bought

work

stand out because it was subtle, because an

expression or pose or gesture had a certain degree of

pages look the

way the majority of readers feels contemporary comic
book pages ought to look. His style, built on what's been
done in the past by the likes of Jack Kirby, Gil Kane, and
Neal Adams, is an eminently acceptable mix of bravura

The

cided that

of

quality without upsetting anybody. His

complexity and storytelling clarity.

Bom in England in 1950, Byrne grew up

Recently, in Fantastic Four, his

Super-

own Alpha Flight, and

Hulk, Byrne has been making an effort to modify his

spent five years trying to draw like Neal Adams,

and then spent five years not trying to draw like Neal
Adams," he's said. "And there was no point in any of that
ten years I've been in the business that spent any time
trying to draw like me. So sat down one day and said,
'How would draw if didn't draw like Neal or not like
Neal?' " He feels his newest look shows some influence
of the French artists. "I've always liked that look. Of
style. "I

kind of professional work, so I took it." Wheelie, based

on a Hanna-Barbera television show, was not done in
Byrne's characteristic style but in one that followed TV
animation. "It was my first real comic book and I said,

going to do a Carl Barks number.'

From Charlton he went to Marvel, taking on such
assignments as Iron Fist, Ghost Rider, Daredevil, Spider'I'm

my

course,
stuff.

quality, the

18

earliest influences are British, the old

The

basic drawing

use of

light

is

the same.

and shade

It's

Eagle

the line

that are changing."

makes a dramatic entrance, and Byrne takes

by Chris Claremont. inks by Terry Austin. (Copyright
Star- Lord

modem

comics by storm. Script

1977 Marvel Comics Group.)

George Carlson
Although he was in his mid fifties when he got into
comics and spent just seven years at it, George Carlson
managed to make his mark. A Smithsonian Book of

Comic Book Comics

reprints the

the hundreds of cartoonists

Golden Age. And Carlson

tin

Williams goes so far

Herriman

for

little

who

work

was amusing himself first

and foremost. And, like Walt Kelly, he had in mind not
only the kids who were buying the comic books but the
grownups who were going to be dragooned into reading
shapes. Quite obviously he

of just fifteen of

flourished during the

his tales to

Among

children," adding, "I realize this

the characters

on a newly painted mountain and sold all kinds of

weather by the yard; the Very Horseless Jockey, who
became rich from a flavored snowball business and then
set out, via steamed-up steam engine, to buy a fine mahogany horse for himself; the Half-Champion Archer,
who wasn't full-time champ because he could never hit
the king's special Tuesday target. There were all sorts of
other unusual props, people, and creatures to be found
wandering through Carlson's lively, cluttered pages,
such as a freshly toasted sandwich board, a young idea

is

praise indeed."

Bom

them.

who did rums in Carlson's Jingle Jangle Tales were the Youthful Yodeler, who lived

one of them. Coeditor Maras to call him "a kind of George

is

1887, George Leonard Carlson had a long

and puzzle-maker prior
to venturing into comic books. Even before the First
World War he was already doing gag cartoons plus an
occasional color cover for Judge. Carlson produced numerous puzzle, riddle, and alphabet books for children's
publishers such as Piatt
Munk and even illustrated
some Uncle Wiggily stories. He concocted puzzles of all
sorts
labyrinths, anagrams, etc.
for kids' magazines.
For a time he was an instructor for a mail-order cartoon
course and he produced more than one book on how to

blond mazurka, and a

draw cartoons. Most of

with shoe-laces neatly pressed,"

in

career as a cartoonist, illustrator,

&

this earlier material is

"with

competent

but traditional, hardly hinting at the wacky side of his

comic books unleashed.

comic book work was done
for a single magazine
Jingle Jangle Comics. Edited by
Steve Douglas and published by the same folks who'd
all

of Carlson's

brought forth the pioneering Famous Funnies, it came

along in 1942 and stayed in business until near the end
of 1949. In its forty-some issues it presented a mixture
of funny animals, funny kids, and fantasy, mostly drawn
in animated cartoon style. It also featured, in almost
every issue, a dozen or more pages of George Carlson.

He was

a one

man band

lettering, pencilling, inking,

two features

of a cartoonist

phy,
tions

all

neatly

sewed on the wrong

side," a

trio of jellybeans, "all slicked up,

who go

forth into the

who was more or less the

object of Dimwitri 's affec-

and could sometimes be found

residing in "her

Raging Rajah,
enemy"; and the Wicked

left-footed uncle's second-best castle"; the

billed as the Prince's "favorite

Green Witch. Prince Dimwitri's interests and adventures

were wide-ranging. In one issue he set out to win the
coveted Doopsniggle Prize with his corn-beef-flavored
cabbage plant; in another he went aloft in an eighteenkarat balloon in search of a missing bass drum.
Carlson also produced, in 1946, two issues of Puzzle

scripting,

the works. Carlson held forth

and The Pie-Face

Prince of Old Pretzleburg. It's safe to say nothing similar
had been seen in comic books before. He mixed burin

buttons

world to seek their fortune.

Pretzleburg, ruled over by King Hokum without much
help from his pie-face offspring Prince Dimwitri, was
similar in appearance and politics to the various lightopera countries and locations to be found in the Tales.
The recurrent players included Princess Panetella Mur-

personality that

Just about

its

four-footed yardstick maker, a zigzag zither, a lovely

Jingle Jangle Tales

Fun Comics. An

lesque, fantasy, and word play into his own individual

brand of nonsense, ending up with material that resembled a cockeyed cross between Lewis Carroll's Alice
books and Olsen & Johnson's slapstick Hellzapoppin
review. He took a streetwise, Broadway approach to

oddity, it consisted mostly of puzzle

pages mazes, rebuses, crosswords, word ladders, etc.
Each issue also contained a six-page tale entitled Alec in
Fumbleland. Starring a blond curly-haired young fellow
named Alec Snigglewit and mixing melodrama parodies
with characters out of Alice in Wonderland, these are
much tamer than his Jingle Jangle work. He left comic
books at the end of the forties, returning to illustrating.
Among the children's books he illuminated were several in the' Uncle Wiggily series. Carlson died in 1962.

fairy tales, turning out multilevel stuff in which the visual

and the verbal worked together. The dialogue in his
Jingle Jangle work demonstrates Carlson's fascination
with language, with cooking up left-handed puns, and
with twisting stock phrases into new and unexpected

20

Romance,

Famous

action,

and

violence, seen as only Carlson could see them. (Copyright

Funnies, Inc.)

1944

Howard Chaykin
Thus far Chaykin is the only comic book artist to have
his work nominated for a Nebula award of the Science
Fiction Writers of America. That happened in 1985,
when three episodes from his American Flagg! were
nominated in the best short story category. None won,
but still the thought was there. Nineteen eighty-five was
also the year Chaykin made an admirable showing in the
poll conducted by the Comics Buyer's Guide. He came
in fifth in

the favorite

artist

provocative adventure and entertainment strip

American Flagg! placed seventh on the favorcomic list, Reuben Flagg himself was seventh on the
favorite character list, and Raul the talking cat from the
Flagg cast easily took first-place honors for favorite supporting character. Chaykin returned to regular comic
book work in 1983 with American Flagg!, after a twoyear absence, and the move seems to have been a wise

In

points of his career

he drew some striking covers for

While he is working on other
recent

juices flow. I'm

with his futuristic

consider a

miniseries

for

Blackhawk.

projects, including a

DC, Chaykin

love the idea of comics, but I'm not very interested

in superheroes." He also felt "that comics need more
"I

Shadow

DCs

is

still

guiding the exploits of Reuben Flagg. "I'm convinced

this is my first major adult work," he's said. "This is
not to eliminate my last twelve years' output, but it is
to say that I have never felt as comfortable with a
character, with a situation, and with a circumstance as
have now." As for what his readers can expect of
him, Chaykin has promised, "The same wonderful
combination of snotty dialogue, nasty characters, venal
attitudes, petty motivations, and sex and violence, with

in American comics." When approached by

Comics to develop a comic book of his own, Chaywas certain he didn't want to do a Marvel-type book

He came up

was a graphic novel adaptation of

My Destination. More recently

Alfred Bester's The Stars

First

they have."

about

away from comics, working in paperbecome "soured very much on what was

lawman, Reuben Flagg, and "what

utilized just

being done

humor than

American Flagg! Chaykin has

comics in the early 1970s. His breakdowns are exmixing movie techniques, European comic book
tricks, and his own personal ideas very well. His drawing
has improved steadily over the years until his figure
work, perspectives, and overall rendering can't be
faulted. While not yet an equal of his idol, Jack Cole,
Chaykin is still very good at blending action, adventure,
and comedy. His scripts don't quite match his artwork
"Chaykin isn't as adroit a writer as he is an artist," is
how MacDonald puts it but he's still several notches
above much of the current competition.
It was in 1972 that Chaykin began his career, starting
out at Marvel and then moving over to DC. He did an
adaptation of Star Wars for Marvel and worked on DCs
short-lived Sword of Sorcery and the even shorter-lived
Scorpion for Atlas. For Star* Reach he produced Cody
Starbuck, another SF opus. One of the earlier high

years he'd been

kin

It's

into

disgustingly enthusiastic about the strip." During the

backs, he'd

pert,

From the moment it was launched, his far-fromutopian science fiction saga attracted favorable comments and substantial sales. Writing in The Comics Journal in the fall of 1983, the astute Heidi MacDonald said,
"American Flagg! is snappy, snazzy and a hell of a lot
of fun." She went on to say, "Each page or panel is
carefully designed as a graphic unit, and the story moves
along as much through the juxtaposition of elements in
each unit as through the traditional panel-to-panel continuity." Her summation was that Chaykin displayed "a
brilliantly unique personal vision."
Chaykin brought considerable enthusiasm to the project. "I feel like my brain and my body are like a phoenix
rising from the ashes," he said shortly before the first
issue appeared. "I have finally found a subject and

my

everything he's learned and developed since breaking

one.

making

Man

before."

ite

stories that are

laughs, like Plastic

category, seventh in favorite

writer.

theme and

and

by Jack Cole."
Chaykin is also concerned with reaching an audience
that is somewhat older than the one comics are usually
assumed to be aimed at. "I've got a particular desire to
hold on to people after their hormones go to hell," he
says, "and stay there with the material. ... I'm trying to
introduce some stuff that
have not seen in comics
thrills, chills,

fairly

22

bit

of

my

new-found prejudices."

Swordplay and heroics with Dominic Fortune, done in Chaykin's inimitable

by Len Wein. (Copyright 1979 Marvel Comics Group.)

style.

Script

Gene Colan
name to the stories. Each panel was written out. felt like
was a student when was finished because would
come in with the work and would show it to the editor

During his forty-some years in comics Gene Colan has

drawn a great many superheroes, including SubMariner, Captain America, and Batman. There are those
who agree with The World Encyclopedia of Comics that
"his most recognizable work has been in the superhero
field" and that "Colan draws incredibly handsome
figures in majestic poses." Colan himself, however, has
never been especially fond of them and has always had
more fun elsewhere. "I'd like to get away from superhe-

and he would go over

When

storytelling

rather

campaigned
cinated by

than superheroic

fly to

Bom

in the Bronx in 1926, he grew up in Manhattan.

discovered newspaper strips early in life and his
favorite was Dickie Dare, begun by Milton Caniff and
"I

would meet

my

father

"I

He

was drawn

to horror

also fas-

movies

like a
got the assignment and, with most

Marv Wolfman, went on

all

of

its

seventy-issue

to

draw Tomb

life.

formats.

The 1980s found Colan once again at DC. Teaming

again with Wolfman, he tried another horror book, The
Night Force. The critical reaction was mostly favorable
"His brooding, shadowy style, often termed impres-

comics at Fiction House in 1944, drawing for

Wings Comics. Appropriately enough, he then entered
the air force. After the war he resumed his efforts and
landed a job with Marvel. "We all sat in a big room
called the Bullpen. Syd Shores overlooked everyone
because he was the oldest member, the one with the
most experience. We were all kids at the time. Within a
week John Buscema came along and he became part

seems especially well-suited to this material

and every so often he subtly captures the emotional
mood of a character with a moving precision that is rare
indeed in comics," said The Comics Journal but the
magazine succumbed in 1983, after just fourteen issues.
More recently Colan's been occupied with the Batman
feature in Detective Comics, and with various miniseries
and maxiseries. He drew the twelve-issue Jemm, Son of
Saturn series and, thus far, two four-issue series of Na-

into

sionistic,
.

of the team."

He worked

Although

was

The book was

quite successful and, in the opinion of Amazing Heroes,
Colan "turned out some of his greatest, moodiest work
on the feature." He also served some time with Howard
the Duck, both in comic book and newspaper strips

recalls. "I couldn't wait for him to come up out of the

subway so could grab the paper out of his hand
and
right out there on the street I'd open to the comics page
to see what happened to Dickie Dare."
Although he attended art school, Colan doesn't think
he learned much that was practical there. He broke
.

flypaper."

of Dracula for

with such anticipation and anxiety at the subway," he

them

of the scripts by

He

on by Coulton Waugh.

enthusiastically to get the job.

frightened by monster films as a child, he

poses.

carried

the superheroes began their

One of his favorite projects in recent years was

Marvel's Tomb of Dracula, a book wherein he could
on

it."

comeback in the
1960s, Colan returned to Marvel. He handled a batch of
them Daredevil, Sub-Mariner, Iron Man, Silver Surfer,
Dr. Strange, etc. Dracula is hard to kill and in the early
1970s he began flapping his wings for Marvel. When
Colan heard of the plans to launch a Dracula comic, he

ing."

concentrate

get into just plain storytell-

roes,*' he's said, "I'd like to

"This

every category for a variety of companies, as the comic book business waxed and waned in
the fifties and sixties. His cinematically designed pages
favoring odd angles, quirky close-ups and lighting that
brought out deep shadows were to be found in war
books, romance books, and such horror books as Men-

thaniel Dusk, Private Investigator

Mystic, and Journey into Mystery. Colan also

worked for DC in these decades, turning out everything
from Sea Devils to Hopalong Cassidy. He wasn't especially fond of this latter assignment. "The artist had no

winning Nightwings.
Colan continues to work, undaunted. "I like to tell a
story once and then move on to another thing." he's
said. "Each story ought to be a challenge in itself and
not go back and repeat what you've already done."

is an honest
man. That makes him as good as dead." The first miniseries about the 1930s private eye got mixed reviews and
only fair sales. The artwork was reproduced from
Colan's pencils, with no inking. More recently, he has
completed an adaptation of Robert Silverberg's award-

in

ace,

leeway," he's said.

"He

wasn't even allowed to sign his

24

^r^-

~~

^EHER\

yl
1

^^^L

.^V

v^

\\

little
/wan, that

v trinket
worthless

^1

will

^riTCAwONLv

ooyouno ^m

^L

AFFECT /WE IP

^^

IT

TOUCHES /Kg.^j

THAT /s outre A LUP/C&OUS

NOTION, MY FRIEND. BUT ^NE
THAT INSPIRES A SUV&EN
INTEREST IN yOJR >>LN<&
.

WOVIAN.

HERS. COD
IS VC?UN<5,

VIBRANT,.

VVOULt? UNCCUSTEVLY
BE /l& THE FINEST
I

\CN/V\YUFS

Colan's Dracula displays both his strength and his hypnotic prowess. Script by Marv

Wolfman.

inks

by Bob McLeod. (Copyright

1979 Marvel Comics Group.)

Jack Cole
Jack Cole was
four

bom

in

months shy of

1914 and

killed himself in

his forty-fourth birthday.

Cole's artwork

1958,

line

spring of his last year, already the star gag cartoonist of

the increasingly popular Playboy, he sold a comic strip
to the Chicago Sun-Times Syndicate. It was titled Betsy

and Me, and Cole provided some third-person autobiography to be sent out with the publicity for it. He said,
"The artist's life (it's not yet completed). Jack Cole was
bom in 1914 in New Castle, Pa. At 15, he took the
Landon School of Cartooning mail correspondence
course. Highlights of his career thus far are: 1932, a
7,000 mile bicycle trip to California and return. 1933,
graduated from high school. 1934, married Dorothy Mahoney. 1934, got a job at American Can Factory and
started mailing out cartoons to magazines. 1935, first
sale to Boy's Life. 1936, borrowed $500 in small
amounts from home town merchants and set out with
his wife for New York to find cartoon work. 1937-54,
worked for comic magazines. 1954, free-lance cartooning. 1955, lost nearly all of his furniture and belongings
in the New England floods. 1958, 43 years old, 24 years

became

a leap ahead with Midnight. His

finer,

he'd been developing. His narratives mixed

cops and robbers, violence, and humor. His
drawing style, a blend of the straight approach and the
exaggerations of animated cartoons, was ideally suited
to depicting Plas's adventures. While the strip is sometimes described as a satire on other superguys, it wasn't
really that at all. What Cole was turning out, in the first
years anyway, was closer to what was being done in the
movies of the time. He was producing his own mysterycomedies.
Throughout the 1940s, while Cole was producing adventure and superhero material, he was also drawing a
good deal of out-and-out funny stuff, most of it in the
one-page-filler category. For Smash there was the Orienthe

skills

fantasy,

married."

His comic book career, which Cole dismissed in four

words, was one of the most impressive ever and Cole is

one of the few comic book artists to be referred to, both

by fans and by his colleagues, as a genius. Cole really
wanted, however, to be a successful gag cartoonist.
Settled in a small apartment in Manhattan and unable to sell many of his cartoons or get paid for the
ones he did manage to sell, he decided to try the comic
book business. Cole first found work in the Chesler
shop, drawing mostly humorous filler pages. By 1940
he was doing more or less straight superhero stuff,
such as The Comet in Pep Comics and Daredevil in
Silver Streak. The following year he signed on with the
Quality

made

more assured, and his layouts and

staging grew even more inventive and audacious. Cole's
interest in movies and animated cartoons shows in his
work. The time and attention he was lavishing on his
Quality pages would eventually cause him deadline
problems, but he was having an obvious good time exploring the possibilities of the comic book medium.
Plastic Man first bounced into view in Police Comics
# 1 (August, 1941). Cole wrote his own blurb for the
initial yam, proclaiming, "From time to time the comic
book world welcomes a new sensation! Such is PLASTIC MAN!! The most fantastic man alive!" With Plastic
Man Cole had a feature where he could make use of all

In the

tal

detective

Wun

Cloo.

Dan Too tin

ran in Hit, Windy

Breeze in National, and Burp the Twerp in Police. Burp

the Twerp, billed as the Super So-and-So, was bald and
had a shaggy white moustache and a body like an overripe balloon. Cole used him to poke fun at the more
sober-sided supermen as well as his own Plastic Man. All
of his humor pages were signed with the penname
Ralph Johns.
Cole came to the attention of Playboy in the middle

line.

in # 18 (January, 1941),
he created Midnight. A fellow who fought crime in a
business suit, snap-brim hat and mask, Midnight was
something of a Spirit surrogate. But since Cole and
Eisner were original and inventive fellows, the two features developed in different directions. While both men

For Smash Comics, starting

1950s. His full-page gags, often done in bright watersoon became staples of the magazine. When, in
1955, Hugh Hefner suggested that he relocate in the
Chicago area, Cole was less than enthusiastic. But the
money offered was very good and he and his wife made
the move. He maintained he didn't miss the comic book
business at all. In fact, when Quality tried to hire him
back, Cole replied he wasn't interested and "that I was
going to be the best damn cartoonist" in the gag field.
And he was very successful with Playboy.
Early in 1958 another of his long-time dreams came
color,

refused to take the profession of masked crimefighter

completely seriously, Eisner became more interested in

urban melodramas while Cole pursued fantasy and science fiction and, on occasion, a somewhat bizarre approach to violence. He had the advantage over many of
his contemporaries in that he could write as well as draw.
He knew how to tell an entertaining story in comic book
terms and how to package it.

true

when he

was dead.

26

sold his comic

strip.

A few months later he

Unlike

some

(Copyright

of his contemporaries. Cole

1940 Your Guide

was obviously having fun with superheroics.

Publications.)

Reed Crandall
hero he inherited from Fine was the yellow-suited Ray.

Quite a few comic book artists, especially in the early

days, looked no further than the funny papers, to Roy
Crane, Alex Raymond, and Milton Caniff, for their inspiration. Reed Crandall was wider ranging, as well as
more gifted, than many of his contemporaries. He was
one of the artists Lou Fine was another who assimilated the techniques of earlier book and magazine
illustrators and applied them to the drawing of comic
book pages. In Crandall's case the admired illustrators
included Herbert Morton Stoops, Henry C. Pitz, and
Pyle.

A Midwestemer,
first

he arrived

for the Eisner-Iger

the Quality comics

line.

New York in 1940 and

shop and then directly for

in

he saw to it that
Stormy Foster and Hercules for Hit Comics, Uncle Sam
for National, Captain Triumph for Crack. Crandall was
also intended to have the star spot in Police Comics,

another of

and war. William Gaines, the

who fights for

civilian life the Firebrand was Rod Reilly,
those millionaire playboys who turned to

EC headman,

said of his

"He came walking in one day and of course we

all had heard of Reed Crandall and we were just as
impressed with him as he was with us. So we fell on each
other's necks and he became part of the group immediately. He was a fine, fine craftsman and did some of our
advent,

crimefighting because of boredom with his ritzy life.

What saved this Wall Street do-gooder from being a
complete dud was Crandall's artwork, which endowed
the rather stodgy stories with a bit more excitement and

very best

stuff." In

the 1960s he

worked

for Classics

Treasure Chest, the Catholic comic book,

and for the Twilight Zone comic. He also contributed

Illustrated, for

than they actually deserved. But neither Crandall nor

Firebrand were any match for Jack Cole and Plastic
life

Man. Cole's

was Black-

of his efforts at Quality

there, including horror, crime, science fiction, pirates,

with the Firebrand, "the mysterious figure

justice." In

before

complicated battle scenes, whether they involved bazookas and flame throwers or hand-to-hand combat.
After Quality folded in the early 1950s, Crandall migrated to EC. He drew just about every sort of story

Everett "Busy" Arnold, Quality

him "the best man ever had," and

Crandall was kept busy. He drew

publisher, later called

until just

1943.

many of the covers and most of the stories. When a

Blackhawk comic book began in 1944, he was there as
well. More realistic here than he had been on the Ray or
Dollman, Crandall seemed to relish drawing the nasty
Axis villains, the sultry ladies who were not to be trusted,
and the many weapons, planes, gadgets, and engines of
destruction that were required. He also excelled at the

1940s.

worked

in

The high point

Although undoubtedly one of the most technically

proficient artists in comics, and a master at drawing the
figure in action, Crandall was associated with few outand-out winners in his long career. His two biggest sucDollman and Blackhawk occurred in the
cesses

demise early

hawk. Crandall first drew Blackhawk and his band of

mercenaries in Military Comics # 12 (October, 1942).
The feature was yet another Eisner creation. Charles
Cuidera, working from Eisner roughs, was the original
artist, and just prior to Crandall Alex Kotzky was handling the drawing. In fact, Kotzky is also responsible for
four of the pages in Crandall's eleven-page debut yam.
Thereafter Crandall was the Blackhawk artist, doing

Howard

He drew him from the summer of 1941

his

and Eerie. Crandall's style grew

and colder over the years and much of his later
work, especially that in the Warren black-and-whites, was
the sort that inspired admiration but not engagement
art that made you feel as though you were in a museum
and ought to step back while murmuring admiringly.
Crandall produced little or no work in his final years,
which were touched with illness and personal problems.
He died in the autumn of 1982.
frequently to Creepy

superhero began in the back of

Police, but within a year it was the undisputed champ.
Crandall took over Dollman, the teeny-weeny good guy
invented by Eisner and drawn initially by Fine, in Feature
Comics # 44 (May, 1941). He did an impressive job,
particularly in depicting the seemingly giant props
flexible

stiffer

fountain pens, briefcases, chairs, mice, bell jars, etc.

his
diminutive hero worked amidst. Another second-banana

28

And so x left my wife and coming baby and a world

rebuilding itself to search for uranium

in

the upper

amazon country.

Wed

located the uranium by geiger- counter, our

plan was to parachute into the jungle .mine it,
build an airfield, and fly it out...

HAPPY LANDING,

YOU TOO, TIM' HOPE WE

LOCATE ALL OF OUR SUPPLIES

There

in that god- forsaken, pest-infested

steaming jungle, we made a camp and prepared jo^ejjj:e_down_for_a five year

STAY.

HELEN' MY

ONCE A MONTH, OUR SUPPLY PLANE CAME OVERCROP-

WIFE' SHE...
CHOKE. SHE'S

PING MAIL AND PROVISIONS. IT WAS OUR ONLY CONTACT WITH THE OUTSIDE WORLD...

A handsome example
Gaines.)

of Crandall's

work from the

fifties.

(Copyright

1986 William M.

Jack Davis
One

humor magazine in comic book

form less raunchy but with a similar irreverent and
wacky outlook and in its pages Davis came into his
own. He perfected a loose, scratchy approach, displaying an admirable knack for exaggerated expressions of
both faces and body. He also showed himself to be a
crackerjack caricaturist, an ability that would win him a

most successful commercial cartoonists in

owes much of his current
status to the fact that he was a featured contributor to
the EC comic books of the 1950s. He once explained
that many of the ad agency art directors who contact him
nowadays were kids back then and still have fond
memories of his work in the EC war and horror titles
and, especially, in Mad.
Davis was bom in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1926. By the
time he was in his early teens he was certain he wanted
to be a cartoonist and he was already sending his work
out to the various kid-oriented publications that had a
page set aside for amateur artists. Tip Top Comics,
among others, printed these early Davis efforts. While
attending the University of Georgia he contributed to
the campus newspaper and also helped found an offcampus humor magazine titled Bullsheet "Not political or anything, but just something with risque jokes and

basically a college

of the

the country, Davis feels he

good many

cartoons." While in college Davis also spent a summer

working as inker on Ed Dodd's Mark Trail newspaper

He headed

east in about

1950

jobs in the future.

Less admirable was some of the work Davis turned

out for the EC horror titles. "I enjoyed doing the horror
bit and they liked it," he's said, adding, "I think it was
pretty bad. At the time, I didn't realize how bad it was
but now that I look back, I know it was." Davis' most
memorable effort in the horror genre was a story called
"Foul Play." In it a nasty ball player gets his comeuppance by being dismembered by his teammates and having his parts used in a ball game
his head for the ball,
arm for a bat, intestines to mark the base lines, etc. Foul
Play had two of its most explicit panels reprinted in
Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent. Robert
Warshow, in a famous essay on horror comics that originally appeared in Commentary, discusses it unfavorably

strip.

"All the syndicates

and major publishers are in New York. Atlanta didn't

have any of that." His first job was with the New York
Herald Tribune Syndicate, inking Mike Roy's The Saint
strip. From there Davis moved into comic books. "I
went around to all the comic book publishers and
was turned down so many times," he later recalled,
"and then
was accepted at EC." He arrived at EC
soon after several of their innovative titles Tales From
The Crypt, Weird Fantasy, Two-Fisted Tales, and Vault
were launched. He did some impressive
of Horror
work for them, in a style that was almost straight but

and concludes,

"I

don't suppose

shall easily forget that

baseball game."

Davis stopped doing this sort of thing in the fifties

to concentrate on humorous work
ever since. Unlike some of his colleagues, he has had
many disciples. And several lesser artists have enjoyed
moderately rewarding careers by imitating him. Although he never completely deserted comic books and
has continued to work for Mad and some of its imitators, the majority of his work has been in other areas:
for bubble gum cards, children's games, Time covers,

and has been able

didn't quite hide Davis's cartoony leanings. "I'm a car-

TV Guide

he admits, "not an illustrator." In 1952 came

Mad, cooked up for EC by Harvey Kurtzman. It was

Discussing his career recently Davis said, "There have

been a lot of thrills, a lot of happiness."

toonist,"

30

covers,

and numerous

advertising clients.

JUST LOOK AT HIM

GO, folks ...LOOK AT

Hm TAKE

OFF.' TMArS WHAT

CALL COURAGE'

IT'S

IF

BRAVERY YOU'RE LOOKING FOR, THIS BOY'S

GOT (Tf also, HE'S GOT NO CHOICE

OH-OH< NOW "CRACK-UP"lS HEADING

THIS WAY. HE'S ABOUT TO DO THE
MOST OARING, THE MOST AMAZING,
THE MOST DEATH-DEFYING STUNT
OF ALL f HE WILL ATTEMPT, WHILE
TRAVELING AT TOP SPEED,TO REACH
OVER AND PICKUP THAT HANDKERCHIEF LYIN6
THERE WITH HIS TEETH

ANO HERE HE COMES' MAN.HFS

VREALLY
BURNING UP THE TRACK
HE MUST BE GOING AT LEAST AS FAST
*S

200 MULES AN HOUR..

WATCH CLOSELY NOW, FOLKS.

HE'S APPROACHING THE HANDKERCHIEF.' HE'S LEANING

FAR OUT OF THE SPEEDING
CAR f HE'S OPENING HIS

HE DID IT, FOLKS f HE PICKED UP

THAT HANDKERCHIEF WTTH HIS

TEETH.' TALK ABOUT

\P0URAGE.THIS BOY
AS

MOUTHf HE'S GETTING READY

TO SNAP IT UP.' WILL HE

ALL, YOU NEVER KNOW

WHAT KIND OF GERMS
YOU MIGHT FIND ON A
HANKY THAT'S BEEN
KICKING AROUND THE
UTAH SALT FLATS SINCE
THE RACING SEASON
OPENEDf,

style that just

(Copyright

about every advertising

1986

William M. Gaines.)

art director

came

ABOUT

FOOL-HARDY US THEY COME.'

YES, SIRf HE'S GOT

COURAGE, folks'AFTER

The

RAW
IS

to love while

growing up.

Steve Ditko
When

most succomic
books, it's sometimes difficult to know what to do for an
encore. To some extent this has been Ditko's problem.
The high point of his career was his involvement with
Spider-Man in the sixties. In the intervening years he's
drawn a wide range of stuff from straight superheroes
to adaptations of TV shows to espousals of his personal
philosophy without ever equalling the impact he
you're

in at

the creation of one of the

Ditko was the Emir of Aliens."

was the decade that saw the triumphant
of the superheroes
Fantastic Four in 1961,
1962, Daredevil in 1964. Ditko had gotten there
Steve

Monsters,

The

cessful characters in the half-century history of

sixties

revival

Thor in
ahead of the pack, creating Captain Atom for Charlton's
Space Adventures very early in 1960, but the blond

captain only made it through ten issues before being

shut down. Ditko's next hero fared considerably better.

Spider-Man, the joint invention of Stan Lee, Kirby, and

Ditko, made his debut in Amazing Fantasy # 15 (September, 1962). The magazine expired with that issue, but
Spidey, having achieved impressive sales figures, returned in his own The Amazing Spider-Man early the
next year. Ditko established the look of the major charac-

achieved with Spidey.

He was bom in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a hamlet

famous for its flood, in 1927. Ditko studied at Manhattan's Cartoonists and Illustrators School, where Jerry
Robinson was one of his instructors. In the early 1950s,
a period when superheroes were not faring especially

Peter Parker, Aunt May, Jonah Jamesonand

Octopus, the Vulture, the Green Goblin,

ters

Ditko broke into comics. A man with an apparent

fondness for fantasy and horror, his early work was for
such magazines as Black Magic, Strange Suspense Stories, and Fantastic Fears, which offered its breathless
readers "tales of stalking terror." His style was not as
sure then, owing quite a bit to the EC artists of the
time. Eventually Ditko developed his own individual
drawing style, influenced by both Joe Kubert and Jack

J.

the villains

well,

Kraven,
sion of

Dr.

etc. He also worked out his own

New York City as a setting for

personal verSpider-Man's
His drawing became a bit

urban crime busting activities.

cartoony, emphasizing the less-than-reverent attitude that Lee's scripts took toward the profession of

more

superhero.

During

this

same period Ditko was also working on

1963 he created Dr. Strange for Strange

the Hulk, and in

Kirby.

1956 he undertook Tales of the Mysterious TravIt showed a certain amount of enterprise on Charlton's part to base a comic book on a radio
show that had gone off the air for good four years
earlier. The Mysterious Traveler, which first came to
radio in 1943, was the Mutual network's answer to such
crime and creeps shows as Inner Sanctum, The Whistler,
and Suspense. The comic book version brought out

the words of historian Joe

him the opportunity to introduce
intricate worlds of mysticism and intrigue." After a falling out with Marvel in 1966, he went on to produce

In

Tales.

This

latter feature, in

eler for Charlton.

Brancatelli, "afforded

some
By

was Get Smart and Hogan's Heroes; for DC Creeper

and The Hawk and the Dove. He drew for the Warren
black-and-whites and turned out Mr. A.
which dealt in
a didactic fashion with his notions about life and the
ongoing conflict between good and evil for magazines

pages for a variety of other publishers. For Dell there

of Ditko's best drawing to date.

the late 1950s Ditko was working for Marvel,

helping the likes of Kirby, Everett, and Don Heck fill
the haunted, monster-ridden pages of Tales of Sus-

like

Witzend.

Those interested in the current Ditko output will find

him back in the Marvel fold again. Most recently he's
been working on such titles as Indiana Jones and Rom
as a penciller. Those interested in his earlier activities
have but to check out recent issues of Marvel Tales,
where his original Spidey yams from two decades ago

Amazing Adventures, Journey Into Mystery, etc.

His work of this period won him many fans and is still
fondly recalled. Writing in Comics Collector, Will Murray has said, "My favorite of the Marvel crew had to
be Steve Ditko. In those days he inked his own pencils
in a creepy, crepuscular style. ... If Kirby was King of

pense,

have been reprinted.

32

poor Aunt /mat ..no matter

HOW SHE SCRIMPS ANO PiNCHES
PENNIES, WE -JUST CAN'T SAVE
ANV /MONEY.' I VE GOT TO HELP
our SOMEHOW
.

~T~ ANO

KNOW JUST

Ditko's classic Spider-Man. striking characteristic poses in both his identities. Script by

Stan Lee. (Copyright

7965 Marvel Comics Group.)

Will Eisner
An entrepreneur as well
much better than most

as an

artist,

Eisner has fared

of his fellow pioneers

in

both

Among

enterprising Victor

Fox

tried to

&

financially and in terms of lasting reputation. The Spirit,

a character he owns outright, is still going strong in
reprints all over the world, and to fans as well as critics
and historians, Eisner is one of the undisputed geniuses
of the comic book field. Eclectic in approach, Eisner
mixed elements from the movies, the stage, radio, literature, and the comer pool room into The Spirit. He also
had a hand in the creation of such comics perennials as
Sheena and Blackhawk.
Bom in Brooklyn in 1917, Eisner was selling his work
to comics before he was out of his teens. By the time he
was twenty-one he was, in partnership with Jerry Iger,
running a shop to provide material for the burgeoning
comic book industry. "We started a factory producing
comics in a tiny little office on Madison Avenue," he's
recalled. "The concept of the studio was to be a packager, to produce the entire insides of a comic book, and
sell it to a publisher who would then publish it." The
early staff included Dick Briefer, Jack Kirby, Bob Powell,
and Lou Fine. "The shop was run pretty much the way
a Roman Galley ship operates. I sat at the end of a long
row of sweating artists."

he differed sharply from the brightly cos-

character,

tumed superheroes to be found leaping and bounding

through the numerous comic books crowding the newsstands. For one thing, he refused to take his profession
seriously. "Sartorically the Spirit was miles from the
other masked heroes," Jules Feiffer has pointed out in
The Great Comic Book Heroes. "He didn't wear tights,
baggy blue business suit, a wide-brimmed blue hat
needed blocking, and, for a disguise, a matching

just a

that

blue eye mask." Feiffer feels that Eisner's characters

were "identifiable by that look of just having got off the
boat. The Spirit reeked of lower middle-class; his nose

may have

turned up, but

we

all

knew he was Jewish."

Eisner quite obviously learned on the job, and had a

great deal of fun doing

it. His stories got better, trickier

melodramatic, and his layouts moved further
further away from the traditional. Nobody's ever
equalled him in incorporating his logo into the splash
panel, and a few have come close to capturing the look
and feel, the shadows and smells, of urban life.
Eisner entered the service in 1942, turning The Spirit
over to others chiefly Lou Fine. Attached to the Ordnance Department, he did considerable drawing and
developed an abiding interest in "educational and industrial cartooning." He resumed working on The Spirit in
1945 and, aided by such artists as John Spranger, Jerry
Grandenetti, Wally Wood, and Feiffer, turned out six

and
and

first clients were T. T. Scott's Fiction

and the incomparable Victor Fox's group of
titles. Eisner drew covers for such magazines as Jumbo
Comics home of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle
Planet, and Wonderworld. His swashbuckling pirate
saga Hawks of the Sea appeared in Jumbo, and for
Wonderworld, after his Wonder Man folded up rather
than face DCs wrath, he drew Yarko the Great. A more
fruitful, and lucrative, association was the one he formed
with Everett "Busy" Arnold. For Arnold's Quality group
Eisner drew Espionage in Smash Comics and cooked
up the tiny superhero Dollman, illustrated by Lou Fine,

House

Sunday papers. The

launch one, the Chicago Tribune introduced a Comic

Book Magazine, and the Register Tribune Syndicate,
a silent partner to Busy Arnold, brought forth a sixteenpage weekly Spirit booklet. In addition to Eisner's hero
it
featured Lady Luck, originally drawn by Chuck
Mazoujian, and Bob Powell's Mr. Mystic. Although the
Spirit somewhat resembled a traditional comic book

the

line

less

more

years of

memorable

strips.

Although the

material appearing in the current magazine

undertook
the editing of Quality's National and Military. He wrote
and drew the initial adventures of the superparriot Uncle
Sam for National and invented Blackhawk and his gang,
drawn initially by Chuck Cuidera, for Military. And it was
while associated with Arnold that he created The Spirit.
As the forties began comic books were selling in the
millions. This had not gone unnoticed by newspapers
and syndicates. Superman had branched out into a
newspaper strip in 1939, and by the following year
readyprint comic books were being offered for insertion
for Feature. After parting with Iger, Eisner

Eisner

still

magazine's

gets to

new

draw

his

is

Spirit

reprinted,

baggypants hero on the

covers. He's also doing

new work

for

Quarterly and continues to produce

graphic novels A Contract With God, Life Force, etc.
"No one ever had to tell him how good he was
and now that he is being told again and again, he is
Will

Eisner's

amenable but hardly impressed," says Feiffer. "He

remains ambitious and competitive, a cartoonist not
out of the. past but an artist who encompasses past,
present and, very probably, future."

34

i^J

^O CLACK ^|

WHO---?

f-

'

|L,?

[SM"

BnuM
^^^IIMHO?

Fll

^Bujoa

uLMI

Wjf^^JL

@l

*
*)v
/nW/

>

^^
[Ma

'

^^^^^

(fl-i

Eisner

was able to come up with an imaginative opening page

1986 Will Eisner.)

(Copyright

like this

week

after

week.

Lee Elias
leading exponent of the Milton Caniff approach in
comic books, Elias broke into the field in 1943. His two
most successful forties characters were feisty ladies, both
Firehair, the Western heroine he
of them redheads
created for Rangers Comics in 1945, and Black Cat, the
Hollywood star turned crimefighter that he took over in
1946. In the ensuing decades he drew in all sorts of
categories, including science fiction, horror, and super-

a collection of weird tales each issue. At this same time

Elias was drawing superheroes for a variety of publishers. He did Sub-Mariner for Marvel, the Flash for DC.
A bright spot in the history of science fiction strips and
one of the best things Elias ever did was Beyond Mars.
It appeared as a Sunday page, running only in the New
York News. But since the Sunday News was sold on
newsstands all across the country, the strip could be said
to have had a national circulation. It began in 1952 and
ran until 1955. The scripts were by veteran science
fiction writer Jack Williamson. Using his novels about
Seetee CT stood for contraterrene, better known these
days as antimatter as a basis, Williamson invented a
tabloid page starring Mike Flint, a "licensed spatial engineer," who lived two hundred and some years in the
future on Brooklyn Rock in the asteroid belt. It was a
time when "a new force paragravity had enabled
men to live and breathe on the asteroids." Elias did an
excellent job of illustration and the strip was a fast-moving adventure feature with touches of real science fiction

The

heroes.
to

Leopold Elias was bom in England in 1920.

America in his youth, settled in New York

He came
City,

and

spent eight years studying the violin. "I loved the fiddle
but couldn't eat it," he's said, "so I studied art at Cooper

Union and the Art Students League." His earliest work

was done for Fiction House, where he applied his variation of Caniff s impressionist style to a

number

of avia-

tumed

crimefighter by night. Elias

was

deft at

and

called for.

He

real

humor.

Returning to comic books after the demise of Beyond Mars, Elias worked again for DC from the late
1950s into the 1970s. He was able to indulge his interest in science fiction with characters like Tommy To-

morrow. There were costumed crimefighters and superheroes, too Eclipso, Green Arrow, Automan plus
assorted weird tales. His output slowed in the 1970s
and for some years he lived again in his native England. He contributed an SF strip called Kronos to a
short-lived independent publication of Joe Hubert's
and did some handsome black-and-white work for the
Warren publications. Elias drew the title character in
The Rook, a B&W magazine that lasted for seven is-

drawing

her in both her roles and was also good with all the
hardware, from movie cameras to motorcycles, that was
stuck with the magazine for several years,

through the various changes the Harvey Brothers put it through while trying to outguess the public

seeing

Suicide Smith, Captain Wings, and Phantom Falcon in Wings Comics. The World Encyclopedia
of Comics, in its entry on him, is quite taken with this
aspect of his work. It says, "Elias's lovingly rendered
airplanes were among the finest of the time." He also
drew his first science fiction strips for Planet Comics.
Firehair was done for Fiction House and was the first hit
character he was associated with.
Elias began drawing Black Cat with the second issue
of her bimonthly (August-September, 1946). His work
had been improving rapidly and he brought a sophisticated, slick look to the adventures of "Hollywood's
Glamorous Detective Star." Red-haired Linda Turner
was a famous movie actress by day and a sparsely costion strips

sues before folding late in 1980. Restin Dane, a.k.a.

the Rook, was a time-traveling soldier of fortune and
Elias illustrated his chronic adventures in an ambitious
wash style. In them he got to mix science fiction props,

it

taste. The magazine was known, in various phases, as

Black Cat Western, Black Cat Mystery, Black Cat Mystic,
and Black Cat Western Mystery. The Black Cat herself,
once "The Darling of the Comics," was dropped in the
early 1950s and the book went on without her, offering

Old West

locales,

Victorian scenes,

and

just

about

everything else he'd drawn in his decades in comics.

Since then, Elias has pretty

36

much

retired

from comics.

Asoursioe..

V hear

IT'S MB, SNAKE OIL SAM

/T'S ^'REHA/R-TAKS THAT

that

what ever n

you OlRJy THIEVING

SNEAK-AnO THAT AND

iS. IT'S GOT

f

THAT AND THAT:

STOP.

oon-t

H/TME
-QHHH.

//v

e VRV issue of RAN6SRS COMICS//

Combining Good
Inc.)

Girl Art with the Caniff influence. (Copyright

1945 Flying

Stories,

George Evans
Evans was born
in aviation

in

Pennsylvania

in

and drawing resulted

tions to the airplane pulps while

did these things

drive

still

in his teens.

He

comic book career in 1946 at that bastion of

Good Girl Art, Fiction House. He'd spent three years in
the air force, where "by diligence, application, and KP,
he rose to the grade of PFC." Although Fiction House
did publish Wings Comics and Evans did get to indulge
his love for drawing airships in that title, most of his
work for them involved more pretty ladies than planes.
In his four years there he drew such features as Senorita
Rio, Werewolf Hunter, Lost World, Jane Martin, and
Tigerman "My first shot at a really key character in
comic books." From Fiction House he moved on to
Fawcett, where he drew everything from cowboys to

began

his

Crandall's pages, however, "there in meticulous tight

pencilling

EC

1952 and worked on just

about every title, doing crime, horror, and science
fiction. When EC started its short-lived Aces High in
1955, Evans was one of the featured artists, drawing all
five

joined the

ever saw."

him

to "ink

Pirates,

Graff,

Bob

Lubbers, and Al Williamson.

"It

no longer

pays that much," admits Evans, "but I have been having

sheer fun writing and drawing it."
Evans has always been an artist whose strengths
aren't of the grandstanding sort. Skillful and efficient,
he's turned out a good deal of excellent work over
the past four decades. Like a gifted and dependable
character actor, though, stardom has eluded him.
This probably doesn't bother him too much, however,
and he continues to sit down at his drawing board
each day with the expectation that he'll have fun at it.

or so."
Eventually they got together and Evans did some impressive jobs for Kurtzman, but the relationship between
them was never a placid one. EC publisher William
Gaines has remarked, "Harvey wanted to draw the story
himself but knew that George Evans could draw it better.
This ended up a Kurtzman story in Evans' style,
.

because Kurtzman really drew the damn thing in his

head.
Evans hated it. ... 1 think Evans deliberately
.

art

provided a good deal of the artwork for Terry and the

improving the look of the strip considerably.
Evans also kept drawing for comic books, joining DC in
1968 to draw both humorous and straight stuff. He
served a hitch with Blackhawk and, of course, did as
many air war stories as he could. These last he once
described as his "greatest joy." A few years ago, after
several stints of ghosting it, he took over the Secret
Agent Corrigan strip. The daily, begun back in 1934 as
Secret Agent X-9, has been drawn by a number of notable artists, including Alex Raymond, Austin Briggs, Mel

covers for the air-minded magazine. Evans also

comic

hands flying."
Nineteen sixty found Evans, anonymously, entering
the newspaper strip field. For the next dozen years he

beautiful

his conscience wouldn't allow

that kind of stuff with both

staff in

drew for the war-adventure titles edited by Harvey

Kurtzman Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales.
His initial encounter with the dedicated and stubborn
Kurtzman didn't exactly inspire him. "The first thing
did for Harvey was the story of Napoleon," he's recalled, "and Harvey wanted me to draw every one of
Napoleon's troops, and every one of the Austrians, the
Prussians, the Russians and everything else. ... So
just decided that
didn't have five or six years to put
into this, and
did it with variations on his tight layouts.
didn't work for Harvey for a little over a year

was the most

Evans says

Captain Video.

He

he made a change that he knew would

Harvey crazy, he knew that Harvey would not have
the nerve to say anything about it, and so it would go
through, and then after it was over, Harvey would say,
"
'You ruined my story.'
Following the collapse of the EC line, Evans drew for
Marvel, Western, and Gilberton's Classics Illustrated. On
many of the Classics assignments he collaborated with
Reed Crandall. He once complained, good-naturedly,
that Crandall's pencilling "knocked hell out of my carefully laid plans and worked my rump off." Since Gilberton didn't pay much, Evans had calculated that the only
way to show a profit was by working fast. When he got

1920. Early interests

in his selling illustra-

38

16 VM:S,CLUmSY WITH LOAPS THEY WERE

NOT BUILT TO c"AKRy, LUMBER INTO THE
AIR/... POINT BLUNT NOSES TO THE LINE5

Nobody can draw World War

Gaines.)

air

combat

like

Evans. (Copyright

1986 William M.

Bill Everett

1917, William Blake Everett got into the comic

when it was nearly brand new. That was in
1938, after a fairly adventurous youth and early manhood that included living on cattle ranches in Arizona
and Montana, serving a hitch in the merchant marine,
working in the art departments of the Boston Herald-

Born
book

their

field

Namor

New York Herald

Traveler and the

Tribune,

and acting

News

start. Coming to America from his decimated undersea kingdom, Sub-Mariner was determined
to get revenge. "You white devils have persecuted and

tention from the

tormented my people for years," he explained to Betty

Dean, the pretty policewoman with whom he carried on
a love-hate relationship. Once in Manhattan Namor carried on like an earlier visitor
King Kong. "He was an
angry character," reflected Everett much later. "He was
probably expressing some of my own personality."
Everett had an affinity for what he called water characters. "I had always been interested in anything nautical,

Kane has said of him, "but

was an unparalleled storyteller." Everett said of himself, "My education was very limited.
dropped out of high school; dropped out of art school
of great facility," Gil

anything to do with the sea ever since I was born, I

guess." For Timely he also created the Fin, for Heroic
Comics it was Hydroman. This latter character had the
dubious ability to change into water. Everett said that
when the idea was first suggested to him, "I thought it was
utterly preposterous." But he went ahead and did it
anyway. His artwork on the early Hydroman stories and
on the Heroic covers was impressive, compensating for
the less-than-inspired concept. Everett also illustrated the
debut adventure of Music Master, a fellow with the evenmore-dubious ability to change into music, for Heroic.
After four years in the army, Everett returned to comics in 1946, "picking up Sub-Mariner where I'd left off."
He went on to draw Venus, Namora, and Marvel Boy
plus a considerable amount of horror material. Eventually the comic book field experienced one of its slumps
"the whole bunch of us were thrown out on our respective ears, and that was when decided I'd better find
another outlet for whatever talent I might have." Everett
found work with various greeting card companies, eventually resettling with his family in his native Massachusetts. Then in 1964 he returned to comic books, once
again working for Marvel. He was the original artist on
Stan Lee's Daredevil and also worked on the Hulk, Cap-

that he

as well." But he put considerable effort into educating

himself.

Asked once

a comic book

have the

artist,

on how to succeed as
"The basic thing is to
and to read as prolifically

for his advice

he

replied,

talent to begin with,

as possible.

Read

as

much

of the material that

is

being

produced today, so that you have a basic foundation in

it. And then
you also must have a desire to work and
work hard." Everett had the knack of not letting the hard
work show in his stuff, which seemed effortless and
.

certain.

features were done for the short-lived CenAmazing Mystery Funnies, Amazing Man, etc.
He got into the business originally by chance. "I came

His

first

taur line

back to

New York

wound up on

the

to take the

world by the heels

unemployment bread

line.

and

was

still

drawing compensation when stumbled onto the comic

book field." A friend suggested Everett drop in at Centaur, where he did the science fiction strips Skyrocket
Steele and Dirk the Demon, followed by a superhero
known as Amazing-Man, who "enjoyed a short but popular life." When Lloyd Jacquet, editor at Centaur, left to
start Funnies, Inc., Everett went with him and served as
I

America, and Ka-Zar.

was back drawing Sub-Mariner when he
died early in 1973. A reformed alcoholic, the last years
of his life- had contained considerable personal tragedy.
tain

was a packager,
book publishers.
Marvel) and it was

the shop's art director. Funnies, Inc.,

providing art and editorial for comic

One early customer was Timely

(later

initially in

a one-shot giveaway called Motion Picture Funnies

Weekly. Produced by the Jacquet shop, the magazine
was a flop. Sub-Mariner fared better in Marvel, where his
feisty personality and unusual appearance attracted at-

roes in comics, and a character Everett was to draw off

and on for the rest of his life.
He had a highly individual style, one that blended
illustration and cartoon elements. Although he acknowledged the influence of such dissimilar artists as Dean
Cornwall, Floyd Davis, and Milton Caniff, you could
never mistake his work for that of anyone else. It was
compelling, distinctive, and fun to look at. "He was an

more than

the Sub-Mariner.

Actually Everett's aquatic hero had surfaced

magazine. In 1939 he
created Sub-Mariner, one of the most durable superheas an art director for Radio

artist

Marvel Mystery Comics that showcased Prince

in

Everett

40

HYDKOMAtl
BOeANOHAeRY HlTTWE'ViSfTOBS* MIDSHIPS WITH
CANNON -LUCE BLOWS /

Everett's ultimate aquatic character, a fellow

right

1940 Famous

Funnies. Inc.)

who

can actually change into water. (Copy-

Lou Fine
A much

more

Although he spent nearly three-and-a-half decades as a

minutive do-gooder for

Lou Fine is remembered and revered chiefly for the comic book work he did early in his
career. This early work was heroic fantasy material for
the most part, drawn in a bravura style that managed
a style the restless and
to be both forceful and lyrical

and one Steranko lists among

"Fine's most significant triumphs," was drawn for Quality's Crack Comics. The Black Condor, originally billed
as "the man who can fly like a bird," began his airborne
career in the first issue (May, 1940). The most attractive
thing about the feature was not the basic concept, not
the paranoid plots or the exclamatory dialogue. It was
Lou Fine's art. Still under the spell of Leyendecker and
Dean Comwell, he turned out one of the best-looking
costumed hero strips of the day. His figure work was
exceptional, his settings whether gloomy Ruritanian

professional

commercially oriented Fine tired of after only a few

years. Today the Lou Fine of this period is spoken of
as "an artist's artist," highly praised by such as Will
Eisner, Steranko, and Gil Kane. Since only a portion of
the stuff Fine did was signed with his own name, only
the more perceptive readers of the time noticed that
Louis K. Fine, Kenneth Lewis, Basil Berold, William
Erwin Maxwell, and E. Lectron were all one and the
same. Interestingly enough, none of the characters he
drew during his stint in Golden Age comics, with the
exception of the Spirit, came anywhere near being a
provhit. Almost all of them left comics before he did
ing, perhaps, that excellent artwork is no guarantee of
success in comic books.
Bom in New York in 1915, Lou Fine studied at the
Grand Central Art School and, for a short time, at the
Pratt Institute. According to his long-time friend Gill Fox,
"as a teen-age boy, Lou's left leg was crippled in one of
the polio epidemics that raged in those days. Not being
able to participate in sports, he spent his time indoors
reading and studying." Among the illustrators he studied
were Heinrich Kley, J. C. Leyendecker, and Dean Cornwell. Their influence is noticeable in his comic book
pages. Fine signed on in the late 1930s with Eisner and
Jerry Iger, to work in their shop and help turn out features for publishers who were jumping into the burgeoning comic book business. "Lou was a very quiet person,"
Eisner recalls. "He wore steel-rim glasses. Thin nose.

its exceptional art but for its

prophecy. Dated December 1941, that issue of National
was actually on the newsstands at least a month earlier.
In the second panel of the first page we see the Japanese
bombing Pearl Harbor.

times singled out, not for

During the early

High forehead. Thin. Red hair. Red

cheeks. And he had a very shy kind of smile, which at
first
thought was just a shy smile. But I found out it was
something else. It was a way of showing anger."
Fine's earliest work appeared in the tabloid-sized
Jumbo Comics Stuart Taylor, Wilton of the West, The
Count of Monte Cristo, etc. His first superhero was the
Flame, a fellow who wore a yellow costume with a crimson cape and hood. Fine, who never wrote his own

book

forties, in

addition to

chores, Fine assisted Eisner

on The

his

comic

Spirit.

When

all

Eisner entered the service in the spring of 1942, Fine

took over the drawing of the weekly Spirit stories. Within

a year, having abandoned all his flying superheroes, he
changed his style drastically. Fantasy and lyricism were
gone, replaced by a plainclothes realism. This is some of
the least interesting artwork he ever did, but he went on
to refine and perfect this approach.

after the end of the Second World War Fine

comic books and moved into commercial art. In
the late 1940s and early 1950s he dominated the Sunday funnies, having as many as a half dozen advertising strips in a single section. This new style was lively,
the drawing and layouts highly effective. Fine had arrived at something that was entirely his own. From ad
strips he moved on to newspaper strips, drawing
Adam Ames and later Peter Scratch. Neither was a
success. At the time of his death, in 1971, he was
working on samples of yet another strip.

Soon

put considerable enthusiasm into illustrating the

Flame's rather prosaic adventures. His pages are full of
leaping action and impressive settings, like storyboards
for a big-budget, yet simple-minded, movie epic. He also
provided numerous covers for Wonderworld and its sister publications such as Mystery Men Comics. Quite
often the package was better than the contents.
Fine's next hero was a teenie weenie one, Dollman,
scripts,

his small-scale career in Quality's

Sensitive nostrils.

quit

'

Feature

Comics #21 (December, 1939). Fine stuck with the

than a year.

Hindustan bazaars, or about-to-be-sabotaged

American industrial plants were always impressive.
Fine also seems to have thought about what a man
would look like if he actually could fly; his Condor panels are filled with awesome shots of his hero swooping,
diving, soaring. Fine, with some help from Charles Sultan and Bob Fujitani, turned out Black Condor episodes
for a little over two years.
Smash Comics # 14 (September, 1940) introduced
the yellow-clad Ray "transformed by lightning into the
powerful combator of crime." His adventures gave Fine
the opportunity to draw Gothic castles amply stocked
with prowling monsters, haunted mansions, magic kingdoms, and swaggering pirates. Another character Fine
did an impressive job on was Uncle Sam, the superpatriotic hero of National Comics. The story in # 18 is somecastles,

who began

less

interesting character,

artist,

di-

42

The best thing about many Fox comics

1940 Fox Publications, Inc.)

of the early 1940s

was the Fine

cover. (Copyright

Frank Frazetta
Frazetta spent

little

and then went on

more than a decade

in

sported a series of his Buck Rogers covers over reprints

of the newspaper strip. Frazetta's subsequent reputation
has caused these particular issues numbers 209-216
to sell for as much as $135 each. Number 208 has a
top price of $7.
In 1952 he signed with the McNaught Syndicate to
draw Johnny Comet, a strip about a racing car driver
who was built along the lines of Tarzan. The scripts
never matched the art and the strip was garaged after a
year. At about this same time Frazetta pencilled a fourmonth sequence of Dan Barry's daily Flash Gordon.
Subsequently he went to work for Al Capp on Li'lAbner
and found himself drawing hillbillies again. Frazetta has

comic books

to earn his reputation, along with a

He managed,

though, to
during the relatively few
years he was in the field, chiefly with a black-and-white
version of the flamboyant fantasy artwork he later did in
his full-color cover paintings and posters.
He was bom in Brooklyn in 1928. "Began pushing a
substantial income, elsewhere.

pencil at age three," he's said. "Attended Brooklyn

Academy

when

of Fine Art

teens he went to

work as

While

eight."

assistant to

still

in his

John Giunta. The

gifted and ill-fated Giunta turned out some exceptional

comic book stuff in the middle 1940s, and his influence can be see in Frazetta's rendering and in his early
layouts. Another important influence on the young Frazetta was the work of Hal Foster, particularly his Tarzan Sunday pages. One of Frazetta's editors supposedly loaned him several Tarzan originals to study
and this may account for some of the changes evident
in his work in the later 1940s.
It was while employed at Bernard Baily's shop that
Frazetta's first comic book work started appearing. Next
he free-lanced for the Pines titles Startling, Thrilling,
etc.
where he drew a variety of features. These included funny animals, teen-agers, and a hillbilly strip
called Louie Lazybones. For Magazine Enterprises,

said he

in

1949, Frazetta turned more serious.

Giunta-inspired

style.

Dan Brand

It

in

that fans

Knight and

Lancer's

He

was with Ghost Rider in 77m

The Durango Kid that he began

mood,
for

and

originals just for

series.

These established him as a

pre-

artists

and the

colorists."

The

film

was

rich

with swords, sorcery, brawny barbarians and ample-

buttocked maidens all the Frazetta trademarks but

was not a box-office hit.
Back in 1960, in responding to a National Cartoonists
Society questionnaire, Frazetta had listed his hobby as
painting and said his ambition was to "someday get just

drew The Shining

DC. There were also some

a whiff of the sweet smell of success."

Famous Funnies

gotten his wish.

44

Conan

the figure

Frazetta

science fiction and horror jobs for EC.

collect Abner strips

mier sword-and-sorcery artist and led to a painting career that continues to be increasingly successful. In the
early 1980s he teamed up with animator Ralph Bakshi
for Fire and Ice, a full-length epic that attempted to bring
the Frazetta look to the screen. "We co-produced," he
said at the time, "and when I say that I mean we coproduced. I did a minimum of drawing, but I did a lot
of teaching. I taught the animators how to draw like
Frazetta, from the background artists right on down to

tales."

Tomahawk

would

do cover paintboth for magazines like Creepy and Eerie and for
paperbacks. For Ace he did Tarzan and several other
Burroughs novel covers. He then painted covers for

pedia of Comics, "the book contains four flawlessly

a heroic

Capp, who

Frazetta branched out in the 1960s to

with a bare-chested hero in an Edgar Rice Burroughs

lost world setting. In the opinion of The World Encyclo-

in

for several years.

ings,

do his more ambitious, Foster-influenced drawing. He

became more conscious of muscles and weapons, too,
and his figures struck more heroic poses. The culmination of this phase came with Thun'da # 1 in 1952. The
only complete comic book ever done by Frazetta, it dealt

Still

Capp

the Frazetta touches annoyed him.

to

drawn jungle

for

turned into one of the curmudgeons he

used to kid in his strip, maintained Frazetta was only in
his employ a matter of months. Apparently the notion

did Trail Colt, U.S. Marshal for Manhunt, using a loose,

Holt and

worked

in his last years

commencing

attract quite a lot of attention

It

looks

like he's

And

harry remembered how he'd pushed her from

the car as it hurtled downward...

SO HARRYt) RUN. HE'D RUN WILDLY THROUGH THE

AMUSEMENT AREA DOWN TOWARD THE BOARDWALK...

Proving that Frazetta was equally good with contemporary subjects and didn't need
barbarians and captive maidens to inspire him. (Copyright

1986 William M. Gaines.)

Fred Guardineer
In 1955, at the age of forty-two, Guardineer left comic
books and ended a prolific career that had lasted nearly
two decades. He was a true nonpareil, an artist whose
style was unmistakably his own, and there's been no one

a giant octopus; encountered, while hunting for a founyouth in Brazil, a zombie queen whose throne
was surrounded by huge slithering snakes; defeated a
tain of

hooded villain who had trained giant condors to murder

people out on the moors; tangled with another ancient
evil queen who exchanged her withered old body for
that of a lovely young woman. Although Guardineer
later said he would have much preferred doing cowboy
strips, he did some of his best work on the odd and
mystical adventures of Zatara and such contemporaries

remotely like him in the field since.

He graduated from college, with a degree in fine arts,
in 1935 and by the following year was in Manhattan
laboring in the Harry "A" Chesler shop. His work started
showing up in books such as Star Comics, Funny Pages,
and Star Ranger. Guardineer contributed humor fillers,
cowboy adventure yams, sea stories, and illustrations for
the text stories. His first continuing feature was Dan
Hastings in Star, a science fiction epic dealing with a
future invasion of Earth by aliens. His style was almost
fully formed from the start. He seems always to have
thought in terms of the entire page, never the individual
panel. Each of his pages is a thoughtfully designed
whole, giving the impression sometimes that Guardineer
is arranging a series of similar snapshots into an attractive overall pattern, a personal design that will both tell
the story clearly

another

artist

and be pleasing

who

to the eye.

and Mr. Mystic. He also produced quite a few covers for the various DC monthlies,
all of them bold and posterlike.
He parted with DC in 1940 to go over to Big Shot
Comics, where he drew Tom Kerry, Marvelo, and Captain Devi/dog. He next did a few jobs for Silver Streak
Comics and a one-shot for Marvel, then joined the Quality line. There he provided back-up features for several
titles: The Blue Tracer in Military, The Mouthpiece in
Police, and The Marksman in Smash. In the immediate
postwar years he worked for Crime Does Not Pay, drawing both true crime and the magazine's somewhat more
cerebral monthly Who Dunnit series.
His final go-round was with The Durango Kid, a
comic book he drew from 1952 to 1955. The backgarbed phantom cowboy was based on the character
portrayed by Charles Starrett in B-Westerns, and Guardineer found this one of his most enjoyable jobs. He
came to feel, however, that he didn't want to keep working in comic books. "I just had to get out," he once
explained, "and set up some kind of security." Leaving
the field, he became a postman in his home town on
Long Island. He kept up drawing on the side, specializing in hunting and fishing illustrations for local newspapers and specialty magazines. He retired in 1975 and
"hung up my mailbag." He's said, "I've enjoyed my
lifestyle since then, working on my own time as an artist." He was persuaded to redraw an early Blue Tracer
as Marvelo, Tor, Merlin,

He was

very early understood that a comic

book page is not a newspaper page. His drawing style

enabled him to create complex pictures by building them
up with simple elements. His figures, machines, and
buildings have a cartoon look and are rendered in a flat,
boldly outlined way. His colors are almost always bright

some ways he was

akin to the Chicago school

Gould, Harold Gray, etc. In
most ways, though, his style was completely unprece-

basics. In

of strip artists

Chester

dented.

Going out on his own, Guardineer next worked for

DC. He drew Speed Saunders in Detective, Anchors
Aweigh in Adventure, and Pep Morgan and Zatara in
Action Comics. Zatara, a moustached and top-hatted
chap who tackled fantastic and supernatural problems
that would've given Mandrake the heebie-jeebies, was
of many magicians Guardineer depicted. In his
two years on the job Zatara met up with the mummy
of Cheops; visited Atlantis and battled sea serpents and

the

first

episode for the September, 1976, issue of Cartoonist PROfiles. That's remained his last comic book work.

first

46

Clear-cut, posterlike storytelling in the service of

(Copyright

1940 Columbia Comic Corp.)

one

of

FBG's many magical heroes.

Paul Gustavson
his comic book career doing humor,
remembered for the flamboyant straight
adventure stuff he drew from the late 1930s through the

Gustavson began

pages

but he

with small circular ones. At times he'd use as

1940s.

is

best

He

in

unexpected ways, mixing large square panels

many

as

a dozen panels on a page, presenting an action sequence

in an almost flip-book way. Gustavson's heroes, like
those of Jack Kirby, were always on the move and they
often burst right out of the bars of the panels.
Unlike his many restless costumed crimefighters, Gustavson was an easygoing man. "Paul was a very relaxed
man," his wife has said of him, "with an even-going
disposition, and could nap immediately for five to ten
minutes any time of day. When he was looking for ideas
for his stories, he'd be found on a couch with a pad and
pencil on hand. He claimed his best ideas came to him
while resting. Then upon rising, he'd draw the characters, in the rough, fill in the balloons as he went along.
He wrote most of his scripts until our daughter was
seriously injured when hit by a car in 1947; after that
only occasionally."
The Midnight character had originally been written
and drawn by Jack Cole, a fellow who was able to mix
considerable humor with his adventure yams. Gustavson took over late in 1942 and almost at once his dormant sense of humor was revived. His work became
more cartoony, his plots much more whimsical. The
Gustavson who'd dreamed up werewolves, zombies, and
swamp monsters for do-gooders like the Angel to combat was no more. Turning his back on derring-do, he

created a troop of second-banana heroes,

Human Bomb, and the Jester.

including the Angel, the

He was bom, as Karl Paul Gustafson, in Finland in

1917, and he and his family moved to the United States
in 1921. He went to work as an assistant to gag cartoonist Frank Owen while still in his teens. Owen, who specialized in screwball jokes and had a quirky, eccentric
style, may seem an odd mentor for a young man who'd
go on to draw superheroes. Gustavson's earliest comic
book contributions, though, show an Owen influence
and consisted of gag cartoons and humorous filler
pages. He made the transition to adventure about the
time he left the Chesler shop to go to work for Funnies,
Inc., around 1938.
His first attempts in the straight adventure area, which
appeared in such Centaur titles as Amazing Mystery
Funnies and Funny Pages, were fairly crude and clumsy.
Gradually he improved, his drawing and his storytelling
sense growing increasingly better. By the time his moustached superhero the Angel appeared in the first issue
of Mawel Mystery Comics (November, 1939), Gustavson had nearly arrived at his mature illustrative style.
Nineteen thirty-nine was also the year Gustavson
began drawing for the Quality line. It was there that he
did his most imaginative and impressive work. For
Crack Comics he drew Alias the Spider, for Feature
Rusty Ryan, for Smash the Jester, and for Police the
Human Bomb. He also inherited Quicksilver in National
Comics and Midnight in Smash. He developed, in the
early 1940s, a very distinctive style of drawing. Using a
fine brush, he worked out an extremely meticulous inking style that used a lot of feathering and shadowing.
Equally eye-catching were his layouts. He broke up the

took up humor again.

When

the

Second World War ended, comic book

no longer content

publishers found their readers were

New types of magazines

Gustavson now drew crime, Western, romance stories. He quit comics in the late 1950s, after
a spell of doing funny stuff for the American Comics
Group. From then on he worked as a surveyor for
with the mixture as before.

were

tried.

the state of

48

New

York.

He

died

in

the spring of 1977.

|V\Bu...ThG-CSt|
HAS TA4EN JH

SPLIT

SANC=

1SHAPB!

SCCND^T ER,AND
-*6 rOjSE,

fl|

|W ^ocl
\1

l3
i

^5

V-''

V*
lTMrf^^ ^?"

$?

v^"^

N A PUASRTHi AN&5L SPRIttl

OUT- REACH INQ UNDER
THE fALCONV INTUSR TO
ftAVl THt dlRLFRQVNBtJNa

good example

blonde damsels
Group.)

of Gustavson's imaginative, restless staging.

in distress.

(Copyright

And

yet another of his

1941 Timely Comics, Inc Marvel Comics

Bob Kane
Unlike
just

many of his colleagues, Bob Kane's fame rests on

Batman. He created the caped cru-

Kane's early work on Batman had a distinctive look.

His cartoony style fit the sort of melodramatic, nighttime stories he and Finger loved to spin. "Batman's
world took control of the reader," Jules Feiffer has said
in The Great Comic Book Heroes. "Kane's was an authentic fantasy, a genuine vision, so that however one
might nit-pick the components, the end product remained an impregnable whole; gripping and original."
The stories, especially during the World War II years,
were good, borrowing a little from O. Henry, from
Damon Runyon, and from the movies. And, of course,

one character

sader, collaborating with writer Bill Finger, in

from 1940

until late in the

1939 and

1960s he was associated

solely with him.

Batman made his debut in Detective Comics # 27

(May, 1939). He was on the cover, swinging over the
rooftops with an armlock around the throat of a hoodlum in a green pinstripe suit. Inside the magazine the
new hero led off the issue in a short, six-page story.
Although the pointy ears on his cowl were a little lopsided and his batwing cape didn't fit exactly right, there
was something intriguing about him. Once he shaped up
and got his act together there was no stopping him.
Within less than a year Batman was securely established
as one of DCs most popular heroes, second only to
Superman. He got his own magazine in the spring of
1940 and by early the following year was also a regular
in Worlds Finest Comics. With Detective # 38 he was
joined by comics' first boy wonder, Robin.
Kane was

bom

Batman and Robin came up

time great comic book

the

some

of the

all-

Joker, the Pen-

Catwoman, etc.
and went to DeWitt Clinton High School
together," Kane once recalled, "and we were always
vying for who would be the top cartoonist." Like Eisner,
although on a smaller scale, he set up a shop early on
to meet the increasing demand for Batman and Robin
material. Finger was the head writer, with teenaged Jerry
Robinson the chief assistant. Others who helped out on
the artwork were George Roussos, Charlie Paris, and
guin,

"Bill Eisner

1916 and began his

He drew a funny
filler for the short-lived Wow!. The editor there was Jerry
Iger, and when the Iger-Eisner shop was formed the
following year, Kane was invited to join up. He drew gag
cartoons, under such titles as Jest Laffs, and a comedyadventure strip about Peter Pupp. These ran in Jumbo
Bronx

in the

professional career twenty years

against

villains

in

later.

Jack Burnley.

Some

of this

same crew helped out on

the

Batman

and Sunday, from 1943

to 1946. The forties found Batman and Robin as occasional guests on the Superman radio show, and there
were two movie serials, neither very compelling, as well.
It was in 1966, when the "camp" version of Batman
reached TV, that the character made a great leap forward. "Batman became the biggest bit of merchandising
the world has seen," Kane has recalled. "That first year
you wouldn't believe it! they sold over 100 million
dollars worth of Batman novelties. It made everybody
newspaper

Comics. In the Pupp feature, which looks to have been

inspired by Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse newspaper strip, Kane first used some of the elements he'd be
handling more seriously in Batman. Pete was a daring
little fellow and a typical four-page sequence had him
going up in a fighter plane to combat a giant robot
controlled by a satanic villain with one eye in the middle

strip that ran, daily

money

of his forehead.

happy. The public loved the show.

His first sales to DC were also humorous, one- and

two-page comedy stuff. These were Professor Doolittle,
a pantomime effort for Adventure Comics; Ginger Snap,
about a wise little girl, for More Fun; and Oscar the

us."

Kane left comics in the late 1960s, about the same

time the Batman show left the air. He has also been
Courageous Cat, Cool
involved with TV animation

Gumshoe

McCool,

hand

at

for Detective.

more serious

about a two-fisted

and the

fare.

sailor;

Pirates vein;

Kane

also

began

trying his

He turned out Spark Stevens,

Rusty and his Pals,

in

etc.

ing in the

and

pop

later tried his

art vein.

When

It

brought

hand

at gallery paint-

asked to comment on

Kane usually
no ready answers. "Who would
Batman would go as far as he did?"

the lasting popularity of his character,

the Terry

and Clip Carson, which dealt with

professes to have

have dreamed that

a soldier of fortune.

50

to

The Batman and Robin on a rampage,

1940 by DC Comics. Inc.)

as depicted by their creator,

Bob Kane. (Copyright

A/ICE' GOING?.

Gil

Kane

Kane has been drawing comics for over forty years and
them for even longer. Unlike some of his
peers, he's an incurable comics fan and is always ready

redesign the born-again hero. Kane's work had improved quite a bit, but what he was doing at that point
was just a very slick version of the DC house style of the

talking about

to put forth theories, criticize what he considers inferior

work, or just chat about artists whose work he admires.
And unlike many critics, he is capable of practicing what
he preaches. He's achieved an impressive and effective
style by working at it year after year.
He was bom in Latvia in 1926. "I was brought up in
New York City," he's said. "I grew up feeding my imagination on the inspired work produced by my personal
gods of that time Hal Foster, Alex Raymond, and Milton Caniff." By his middle teens he was employed in the

sixties.

years

The same can be

up two

said of his Atom, started

later.

Kane's real breakthrough came

when he did

in the

middle 1960s,

number of features for Tower's short-lived

Thunder Agents.

He

finally

arrived at the detailed

been building on ever

began
he says
about the changes in his drawing. "Everything that had
to do with understanding how things worked and what
bravura
to

style he's

become

since. "I

interested in structure, placement,"

especially distinguished.

underneath. And that for me became a

worked out of that attitude and think
it's made me what
am today." He went on to say, "In
the beginning, what hated about my work was that it
was so timorous. It would just come off in little dribs and
drabs, and could see that it was dominated by one style
or influence at this point and another influence at that
point. Then
began to make up my mind and come to
terms with what really wanted in the work, and began

temporaries

to put everything together."

they looked

comic book field, free-lancing for MLJ titles and working

in the art shops of Jack Binder and then Bernard Baily.
He also helped with such Simon and Kirby strips as
Sandman and Newsboy Legion. In addition he drew
everything from teen-agers like Candy to costumed
crimefighters like the Black Owl. Although he had a
great deal of enthusiasm, his drawing at the time was not
like

was

in

Kane feels that while his conAlex Toth and Joe Kubert might've

improve.
In 1947 he was hired by editor Sheldon Mayer to
draw Wildcat for DCs Sensation Comics. Kane had
been bom Eli Katz and hadn't yet decided on what he
wanted to call himself. He signed the Wildcat adventures
with the name Gil Stack. Within a few more years he'd
settled on Gil Kane as a penname and was turning out
a great deal of material for DC. Much of it was in the
Western genre Johnny Thunder, Hopalong Cassidy,
The Trigger Twins, etc. a category he'd been fond of
since discovering the King of the Royal Mounted news-

strip as

ber of

to

life

roes.

He

projects in

mind

at the

moment. When

draw is some idea of power gathering itself, and all of

a sudden that power is blocked and the power has to
assert itself and strain itself and there's an enormous
resistance to it and all of a sudden the power breaks
like to draw."
through and leaps free. That's what

1960. He'd already brought the Flash back

there was once again a public for superhepicked Kane to do the artwork and had him

and

new

asked at a comics convention a couple of years ago

what he enjoyed drawing, Kane replied, "What I like to

a boy.

The character that won Kane his first large audience

was Green Lantern. A Golden Age retread, the superhero was revived and refurbished by editor Julius
Schwartz

Kane moved over to Marvel in the 1970s to work on

Spider-Man, Warlock, Conan, Ka-Zar, etc. He was also
their premier cover artist. He returned to DC in the early
1980s and has been drawing the Superman annuals,
Sword of the Atom, and quite a few covers. Restless and
interested in experimenting, he also created a one-shot
black-and-white comic called His Name Is Savage in
1968. In 1971 he produced a sword-and-sorcery graphic
novel, Blockmark, for Bantam. He was the artist on the
Star Hawks comic strip, which began its four-year run in
1977 and was the only double-sized newspaper adventure strip ever. During this period he also drew the Tarzan Sunday page.
He recently moved to Southern California and continues to work for DC. It's safe to say he has any num-

And he

paper

the

not.

boy genius category back then, he himself

believes that was a good thing. "I think
that my triumph was that
was lousy early on," he
says, "and it wasn't until
really started to work out
systems, to really question the work" that it began to

been

like

point of view.

in

felt

52

'

but
I

if

fftofesaoa

WRITE THEM...

THEN THAT
/KEAM6.

Spider-Man meets the

Script by Gerry

Group.)

original

Conway,

X Men. and

Gil

Kane provides a moody dream sequence.

1972 Marvel Comics

inks by Steve Mitchell. (Copyright

Walt Kelly
Walt Kelly was a contradictory man. In his work he could
be gentle and whimsical, while in real life he was often
quite the opposite. An expert at drawing lovable animals,
pixies, and princesses, he was also an enthusiastic participant in the saloon life of Manhattan. In spite of all the
stresses and contradictions, Kelly managed to produce
some of the funniest, most visually attractive comic book
work of the 1940s. In addition to Pogo, who began life
unobtrusively as a comic book character, Kelly drew
dozens of other features and turned out hundreds of
pages of funny stuff.
Bom in 1913 in Philadelphia, Walter Crawford Kelly
moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut, two years later along
with "father, mother, sister, and sixteen teeth, all my
own." The impulse to be a cartoonist hit him quite young
and while in high school he drew not only for the school
paper and the yearbook, but for the local newspaper as
well. Although the majority of his comic book work was
produced in the 1940s, Kelly did sell a small amount of
work to the magazines in the days before a single superhero had leaped over a single skyscraper.
The turning point of his life, or at least of his drawing
style, came when he journeyed to California to work at
the Walt Disney studio. While there Kelly "and 1500
other worthies" turned out Snow White, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and The Reluctant Dragon. Leaving
Disney in 1941, he returned to the East Coast. "Back in
the U.S.A once more," as he later described his return
to the New York area, "Kelly went straight. He got a job
doing comic books." He was hired by Oscar Lebeck,
who was editing the comics Whitman and Dell were
jointly producing and publishing. Fresh from several
years of drawing funny animals in Hollywood, Kelly

appeared, appropriately enough, in Looney Tunes,

where Kelly drew six episodes in 1943. Moving away
from what his predecessors had done and forgetting
about fantasy, he turned the feature into a series of
slapstick comedies.

Pogo and

Hyde

side surfaced in Pat, Patsy,

Percy.

in

into

Noah Count Ark, etc. before settling down as Aland Pogo. Bumbazine was a small black boy who
shared the swamp with the animals and, in the manner

was able to talk to them. As the

progressed Bumbazine and the other swamp denizens abandoned conventional speech for a patois that
was part Southern, part Li Abner "Man! Ah di'n't
know yo' was a edge-you-cated owl." "Oh, sho! Ah
comes from a long line of smart-headed owls."
By the time Pogo reached his cute, nonscraggly state,
of Christopher Robin,
strip

'I

Bumbazine had departed. The first comic book of nothing but Pogo came along in the spring of 1946, entitled
Albert the Alligator & Pogo Possum. By 1949 a Pogo
Possum magazine was being issued on a fairly regular
basis. It folded in 1954 after sixteen issues. The Pogo
comic

strip started

running nationally

in

1949.

comic book Pogo stories, where Kelly had

ten or more pages to play around with, he blended
smart dialogue and broad comedy situations. The result was something that was both amusing to look at
and amusing to read. He couldn't always control his
bawdy leanings, and old burlesque routines, including characters dressing up in drag, would now and
then show up. At times he'd even slip in the punch
In the

is

line of a
in

well-known

the comic

political

years, to

and Pete, a

named

Animal Comics

pushed him

associates eventually

the

dirty joke.

book version

satire,

What

of his

Kelly didn't use

swamp

epic

was the

increasingly heavy-handed in his last

be found

in

the newspaper

strip.

He

obvi-

ously wasn't taking himself too seriously back then.

The result was some of the best-drawn and funni-

screwball saga that starred a pair of real kids, a talking

penguin, and a short-tempered pirate

in

bert

most evident in the sort of work he did for magazines

like Raggedy Ann + Andy, Fairy Tale Parade, and
Santa Claus Funnies. For the rag-doll comic he drew a
regular feature entitled Walt Kelly's Animal Mother
Goose, wherein he illustrated nursery rhymes in his best
children's-book manner. Although he loosened up a bit
when turning The Gingerbread Man and similar tales
into comic book stories, he was usually careful to remain
cute and polite most of the time.
His Mr.

and rowdy modes began

second-banana position. Initially Pogo was just a "spear

carrier," handicapped, as Kelly later pointed out, "because he looked just like a possum. As time went on, this
condition was remedied and Pogo took on a lead role."
The feature appeared under a number of titles in its early
days Bumbazine and the Singing Alligator, Albert and

and screwball dialogue.

nice Dr. Jeykll side of Kelly's artistic personality

and Pete

1942. Although the original star of the magazine was

that venerable rabbit gentleman Uncle Wiggily, Kelly's

delighted in slapstick situations

The

Kelly's Pat, Patsy,

like is

his cute

must've seemed ideally suited to go to work on the new

titles
Animal Comics, Our Gang, and Fairy Tale
Parade about to be launched.
Kelly split himself in two for comic books. One persona specialized in cute stuff, Disneyized animals and
adorable kids. The other, a much more rowdy fellow,
had a lowbrow streak mixed in with the cuteness and
kid

What

a slightly cockeyed version of the Laurel and

Hardy shorts, with a touch of the Katzenjammer Kids
mixed in for good measure. He was able here to build
gags and comedy situations, which he couldn't do in his
more sedate stuff. He needed the elbow room and the
relative freedom from restraints the monthly eight-page
format allowed.
The feature with which Kelly was able to indulge both
looks

est

It

54

comic book material produced

in

the

Golden Age.

Kelly turned out

derby-wearing
Lebeck.)

hundreds of pages of

mouse named

raffish

Nibble, ran in

funny animal

stuff.

This

strip,

featuring a

1947 Oskar

Animal Comics. (Copyright

Jack Kirby
Comic books in their present format were only a few
when Kirby began his career. About half the

It

that

years old
titles

on the stands back then simply reprinted newspa-

per Sunday pages and

strips:

issue of

peared

funny-paper style. Kirby was

one of the artists who changed that and gave comic
books a vocabulary of their own. He realized early on
that he was not telling stories in daily or weekly snippets
but in ten- and twelve-page segments that allowed him
room to open up. He broke up the pages in new ways
and introduced innovative splash panels that stretched
across two pages. And he made sure they moved "I had
to compete with the movie camera." he's said. "I felt like
John Henry. ... I tore my characters out of the panels.
made them jump all over the page. I tried to make that
cohesive so it would be easier to read."
There was freshness and energy to Kirby's early work.
He had a brash, noisy style, that of a tough street kid
Dying to mask his grace. He was especially good at the
sometimes the
figure in action. His characters moved
panels couldn't contain them and when they slugged
each other you felt it. His heroes were brawlers, more
stuntmen than matinee idols. They didn't care if they
mussed their hair and weren't worried about looking
their original material in

handsome in every shot.

that worked.

Kirby's fight scenes blended the

Somewhat

like

and

ballet

a choreographed saloon

name

New

created Stuntman

style that

many

and the Boy

Explorers.

Avengers, etc. introduced the mixture of operatic heroics and explosive fantasy that was the foundation of
Marvels immense popularity from the sixties on. When
he left Marvel in the early 1970s, he went to DC to draw
and write the Fourth World series. This was a complex
undertaking, involving such titles as The New Gods and
Forever People, and blending Kirby's bravura drawing
with his personal slam-bang cosmology. Since then
he's moved around, laboring for a time in animatioa
drawing alternate press books like Captain Victor]..
and then returning to DC to take another crack at
his Fourth World mythology. Although some of the
earlier freshness is gone, replaced with the patented
Kirby mannerisms, he remains an artist to reckon with.

work

for a shoestring syndicate called Lincoln FeaThis outfit provided strips and panels to small-

town newspapers, and Kirby drew political cartoons,

true-fact panels, and an assortment of comic strips for
them. Some were drawn in an imitation Alex Raymond
manner, others in a rough version of the later Kirby
style. To a couple of the features he signed the name
Jack

1950s Kirby went solo. He. with an assist from

Stan Lee, was a major factor in the superhero revival of
the 1960s. His work on The Fantastic Four. Thor. The

tures.

set

In the

by the movies and the adventure novels Edgar Rice

Burroughs and H. G. Wells were his favorites he devoured. He was drawing as early as he can remember,
and his first published work was for a newspaper
put out by a neighborhood club. In 1935 he got a job
with the Fleischer animation studios, then located on
Broadway in Manhattan. He served as an in-betweener
on some of the Popeye shorts. Two years lateT he went
to

America

subsequent Marvel artists have tried to follow, and their

sr-~:cr DC. especially the striking covets forAdoentu re
and StarSpangled boosted sales considerably. After the
war they branched out, doing crime books. Westerns,
and the first romance comic book For Harvey they

is Jacob Kurtzberg and he was bom in

York's Lower East Side. It was a rough
place to grow up and Kirby. a lifelong movie buff, has
called it "Edward G. Robinson territory." One of the
things the place gave him was *a fierce drive to get out
of it." Kirby's earliest escapes were fantasy ones, aided

His real

tabloid size, that ap-

pressive. Their Captain

brawl.

1917 on

initially

in the

Lance Kirby. By 1940 he was signing his comic book

work with a name that borrowed from two of his earlier
ones, and he was Jack Kirby from then on.
Although the earliest comic book work was done solo,
with Kirby pencilling, inking, and sometimes scripting,
his most memorable work in the Golden Age was done
in collaboration with Joe Simon. The first Simon and
Kirby team-up was for the second-banana superhero
Blue Boh in 1940. They went on to do Marvel Boy.
Captain America one of the most successful comic
book characters ever the Newsboy Legion, the Boy
Commandos, Sandman, and Manhunter. The team usually worked with Kirby pencilling and Simon inking, or
at least supervising the inking when the work load got
too heavy. Simon also handled the business end of
things. The work they turned out in the 1940s was im-

violent with the lyrical, a mixture of wrestling

Jumbo Comics,
summer of

1938. Kirby was represented

by Sunday-page-style features Wilton of the West The
Diary of Dr. Hayward The Count of Monte Crista.
About this same time, for another small syndicate, he
drew a strip called The Lone Rider. It was inspired,
unofficially, by the Lone Ranger radio show and the
penname used was the somewhat romantic one of

many of the others laid out

was as Jack Curtiss. along with two other abases,

he made his comic book debut That was in the first

Curtiss.

56

Captain America plants a Kirby roundhouse right on the FLihrer's chin. (Copyright
1941 by Timely Comics. Inc and Marvel Comics Group.)

Bernard Krigstein
A controversial figure in comics, Krigstein's best-remem-

book

stories in

ways

if

that

cranky. Basically nice."

The

the reader inside.

"I

tried before. "I

was supposed

three years he

stories

for

Incredible

didn't offer that

trick

much new

in the

way

of suspense.

of not telling the reader which character

The
was

which until the end was not an especially fresh one.

But Krigstein took the story, opened it up and applied
everything he'd been developing up until then to it.
When he was given the story it was to take up just five
pages. He felt it needed at least twelve and, after considerable back-and-forth discourse with Gaines, he was

to lure

never liked the idea of the splash

panel as a storytelling device," he says. "They serve no

artistic or dramatic purpose. There's no reason a story
can't start right out with the opening situation, instead
of having a big panel first."
His approach was thoughtful, each panel making a
point, building the mood, moving the story along. Each
individual panel was important to him. He also played
with time and its often subjective nature. Several events
might happen all at once in one large panel. Others

allowed to stretch to eight. "It was a masterpiece,"

Gaines recalls, "but it presented us with a hell of a
problem." Because of its new and unexpected length,
other stories had to be juggled around.
After a disagreement with Gaines, Krigstein left EC.
He continued to work for some of the Atlas titles
Astonishing, Journey into Mystery, Strange Tales, etc.
until the late 1950s. Krigstein broke his Atlas stories
down into even more panels. The record seems to
have been reached in the April, 1956, issue of Uncanny
Tales with a tale entitled They Went Below, in which
he fit seventy-five panels into just four pages. Even
when using as many as twenty panels on a page he
almost never lost clarity or gave the impression of clut-

might stretch out across a half-dozen small panels

hunted Nazi war criminal falling from a subway platform, for example. Krigstein was influenced by both the
movies and the theater. "Sometimes I'd think in terms
of a camera or a movie, and very often I'd think in terms
of just a proscenium stage."
Bom in Brooklyn in 1919, he entered comics in the
1940s. After service in World War II, he worked for
awhile in the shop run by Bernard Baily. He moved on,
and "between 1946 and 1949," he says, "I did an enormous amount of work for Fawcett Comics, handling two
books: Nyoka and Golden Arrow. " After that he drew

ter.

"Those were the

plains.

them

and Ziff-Davis. It was Harvey Kurtzhim to come to EC, although it turned

he never did much for the titles Kurtzman ed-

"I

attempt at

man who

book

invited

last

things

did," Krigstein ex-

and sending
were my
carrying out an object lesson of how comic

stories

limitless

58

was

really

writing messages

to sea in a bottle there.

for Timely, Hillman,

out that

was with EC,

Krigstein drew over

Science Fiction, Crime
SuspenStories, The Vault of Horror, etc. His most
widely discussed comic book story was Master Race,
which appeared in the first issue of EC's Impact
(March-April, 1955). A simple, grim tale of a chance
encounter between two concentration camp survivors
one a former inmate, the other the ex-camp commander during a ride on a New York City subway, it
forty

panel, that traditional teaser that

he "wasn't quite

EC's other editor, Al Feldstein, liked what he did and publisher Gaines agreed.
"Very rebellious and a very fine artist," is how Gaines
remembers him. "Strong-willed, serious, a little bit

nobody had

said, in fact, that

right" for them. Fortunately,

stumbled upon an important way to tell

stories," Krigstein has said, "to break down stories." The
breakdown of each page was important to him. To tell
the stories in the most effective way possible he abandoned conventional layouts and threw out the splash
really feel as

Kurtzman has

ited.

bered and most-argued-about work was done thirty

years ago for EC. Although he'd been in the field for
several years prior to signing up with the Gaines outfit,
drawing such features as Space Patrol, Nyoka, and Wildcat, Krigstein feels he was restricted as to what he could
do in those early years. "EC really provided the atmosphere of freedom and artistic encouragement," he's
allowed all the guys there to
said. "They allowed me
develop their own personal ideas."
Krigstein's personal ideas involved the telling of comic

Those

stories

could be broken down ... to show the

that a comic story could be unfolded."

ways

PlETRO MIUTA_ ...GRABBED THE SACK

WITH ITS LOAD OF

...AND, WITH 6IN0 ALCARI

FOLLOWING...

.BROKE FOR THE FRONT DOORf

SILVER...

AS THE FRIGHTENED PAIR

FLED DOWN THE STREET.THE
STARTLED CRIES OF THE
ROBBED OLD MAN SHATTERED THE STILLNESS.THEN
DRIFTED OFF INTO THE SILENT
DARKNESS...

Krigstein's stop-time

breakdowns

in action.

(Copyright

1986 William M. Gaines.)

Joe Hubert
One of the comic book field's child prodigies, Kubert
began working professionally while in his early teens. He
started in the late 1930s as a sort of apprentice at the
art shop run by the enterprising Harry "A" Chesler. By
the time he was sixteen he was doing back-up features
in Police Comics, Speed Comics, Smash Comics, and
several other magazines. In addition to his

own

"At one time or other," he's said, "I've worked for poscomic book publishing house in the busi-

sibly every

ness."

Kubert returned to
the superhero

Our Army At War and the World War German aviator

Enemy Ace in Star-Spangled War Stories. When DC
I

Sheldon Mayer and in 1944 was

assigned his first major character, Hawkman in Flash
Comics. He was responsible for nearly three dozen
Hawkman stories and contributed sixteen covers to
Flash. During his initial stint with DC, Kubert also drew
the Flash, Dr. Fate, and Sargon the Sorcerer.
His drawing in the 1940s has a highly individual look.
He had a lush inking style, rich with feathering and
shadows. Although his figure work was not exactly perfect, Kubert's staging and his depiction of action were
attention of editor

acquired the rights to Tarzan in 1972, Kubert was selected to be the artist. He said at the time that he went

back to the Sunday pages of the thirties. "I've tried to

pore over Hal Foster's old Tarzan work and to get out
of
I

it

that feeling of excitement

first

saw

my illustrations, and

keep the drawings as

fantasy

strong as

in

me when

want to

hit

home on

concentrating on

direct, as effective,

I'd

and as

can."

more on editing and

on running the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and

weird tales he illustrated for comics like Avon's Eerie,

The Challenger where one of his stories was a handsome seventeen-page adaption of the Golem legend
All New, Planet Comics, etc. Kubert doesn't think highly
of much of what he did in this period. "Looking at some
of that material," he says, "at the distortions and bad
drawing, gives me the shudders." He is, of course, comparing the youthful Kubert with the much more slick and
professional Kubert of today. To many readers of the
forties, though
myself included his work stood out as
being exceptionally attractive.
The World Encyclopedia of Comics is fonder of the
Kubert of the 1950s. "Perhaps Kubert's finest work,"
they say, "came during the 1950-1955 period when he
was an editor on a short-lived prehistoric strip called

In recent years he's concentrated

Graphic

Art, Inc., in

New Jersey. He

does very

effective

and imaginative covers for many DC titles and still finds

time for an occasional story. There are many who consider him one of the best graphic storytellers going. Writing in The Comics Journal, critic R. C. Harvey has said,
"The essential quality in Kubert's storytelling is contrast.
He contrasts the large and the small, with inset panels
imbedded in splash panels, with long shots and closeups, and with rapidly shifting camera angles. Other cartoonists do this, too, of course. But the contrasts appear
more vivid, more jolting in Kubert's work because his

drawings are
Kubert's

The Tor comic book is also one of Kubert's favorites. "It was conceived while
was in the army in
1950, on a troopship heading for Germany. still have
the notes and sketches
did at the time." The 1950s
saw him, out of the service and abandoning DC for

relatively simple."

move

into

newspaper

strips

was made with

Tales of the Green Beret. This was in 1966, when a

great many people weren't in the mood to take a

Tor. "

strip about war in Vietnam to their hearts.

Kubert abandoned it the following year. He put in
a brief spell in 1981 drawing the Winnie Winkle strip,
and he was mentioned as the artist to do a proposed
revival of Terry and the Pirates, but nothing came
of the latter project. All in all, he never came near
equalling his comic book success in newspapers.

comic

awhile, drawing for a variety of other publishers. Dur-

com-

He

even did a few

jobs for EC's Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales.
fiction.

generated

these rather than making too florid an illustration.

like to

and science

it

years ago. I'm trying to accomplish a sim-

the vibrant points of telling the stony

He was very good at creating the mood of

required in Hawkman, Sargon, and the assorted

ing this decade he turned out Westerns, horror,

it

plification of

impressive.

edy, romance,

1960s and has been

in the

be revived. There was a swing away from fantasy in these

years and he began to do a great deal of realistic combat
stuff, notably with the World War II hero Sgt. Rock in

stuff,

Kubert inked the work of such substantial artists as Lou

Fine, Mort Meskin, and Jack Kirby, and he credits this
as an important part of his education. He came to the

DC

He drew Hawkman once again when

boom caused the winged crimefighter to

there ever since.

60

Kubert was doing impressive work even early

Publications.)

in his career.

(Copyright

1946 Interfaith

Harvey Kurtzman
He's been called one of the three greatest American
comic book artists Barks and Eisner were the other
two. The Comics Journal, which nominated him for that
triumvirate, applauded Kurtzman for "the originality
and uncommon intelligence of his approach to the comics medium" and for his "bold, expressionistic style,
which no one has ever matched." Interestingly enough,
almost all of the work that's earned Kurtzman his accolades was done in the single decade following the end
of World War II.
Bom in New York in the autumn of 1924, Kurtzman
was working in comic books before he was out of his
teens. His first job was in a shop run by Louis Ferstadt,
a leftist painter who earned his living producing features
for DC, Timely, Ace, etc. Kurtzman drew such secondbanana superheroes as Magno and Lash Lightning for
various Ace titles and did some humor fillers on his own
for Police Comics, etc. None of this stuff, which consisted of conventional "bigfoot" art, was in the style now

also included samples of

After getting out of the service in 1945,

named

were going to be a commercial

"I

the

followed.

Next came Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat,

which Kurtzman edited as well as drew for. He's said,
"All our stories really protested war.
don't think we
thought war was very nice generally." Everything in
these war magazines was exhaustively researched and
Kurtzman's own stories had a stark, grim look. His
straight drawing was unconventional, a bit cartoony, and
I

boldly inked.

Nineteen fifty-two was the year Kurtzman came up

with his major contribution to comics. "I'd always been

doing satire in school, in the streets; it was my kind of

clowning," he says. "When I wanted to win popularity,
I'd draw a cartoon. ... So I proposed the format Mad,

We

proposed the title, made little title sketches and showed

to Gaines, and he said, 'Go ahead!' The format would
make fun of comic books as they were at that particular
period. So I had a 'horror' story and a 'science fiction'
story and so forth. We used the physical format of EC
I

we

got
ourselves a skylit loft and then we moved to a secondstory storefront. We called it the Charles William Harvey
Studio, and a lot of interesting people ran in and out."
While part of the studio, Kurtzman did some of his

four

came

center.

earliest

work

in his distinctive

art studio. First

humorous style.

First

it

called Hey Look!, for various

a loose, thick-outlined way and
often reversing black and white and looking like negatives, these were wild and violent things. Explosions,
fires, people eating furniture, axes, and machine guns
were frequently to be encountered. Many of the Hey
Look! pages remind you of storyboards for animated
cartoons, ones that even an avant-garde studio like UPA
would've found too strange to touch. Working in a similar vein, he did Silver Linings for the New York Herald
Tribune. Although drawn in a daily strip format, it ran
in color in Sunday funnies sections around the country.
For John Wayne Comics, of all places, he turned out
five-page cowboy parodies starring Pot-Shot Pete, the
sheriff of Yucca-Pucca Gulch.
Kurtzman first got together with William Gaines and
EC in 1950. Initially he had approached them about
doing nonfiction-type comics "One thing was work-

a series of one-page

Marvel

titles.

how Mad

in

success almost from the start, Mad is still with us.

Kurtzman, for various reasons, left the fold soon after

Mad

switched from comic book to magazine format in

1955. He went on to edit and contribute to Trump,

Humbug, and Help! None

drawing and

was

trying to explain the ulcer graphically."

of

them

thrived.

He began

from his
Annie Fanny strip in Playboy in the
early 1960s, and is still at it. Asked once for his opinion
of his own work, Kurtzman replied, "I have a high
writing, with considerable help

friends, the Little

opinion of
ion.

my

work.

really like

my

And
stuff,

at the same time a low opinbut I'm very dissatisfied with

sense that I wish it could be a lot better. think

is great, but I'm completely convinced that I'm
the only one who thinks so." His modesty hasn't prevented him from coming up with new projects. Most
recently he's edited Nuts!, a humor magazine in paperback format. He's also back contributing ideas to Mad.
it

in the

my

started."

ing on,

with the legal text requirement in the

gathered in my favorite artists, I wrote the stothem out, and that is the God's honest truth on

stories,
I

ries, laid

fillers,

Drawn

and

"our stomachs ached with laughter." In spite of

first job Kurtzman did for EC was a straight
educational comic booklet on syphilis titled Lucky Fights
It Through. Work for the horror and science fiction titles

got together

Charlie Stem.

in his portfolio

recalled,

that,

associated with him.

with Willie Elder and a guy

Hey Look!

these impressed Gaines and editor Al Feldstein even

more than the ulcer. "We were just dying," Gaines has

He

62

stuff

ANPI
MI?NY0Uf
AHYTHWG
VfcXJSAV

BE
HELP

WILL

Proof positive that there's only one Kurtzman. (Copyright

1986 Harvey Kurtzman.)

Joe Maneely
If you look only at the statistics, you might conclude that
Maneely was nothing more than a very prolific hack. In
the ten years he worked in comic books he turned out
dozens of features and drew nearly six hundred covers
for Marvel alone. When you look at his pages, though,
you see that he was a gifted man with an effective and

drawing

would

&

the unusually

named Tao Anwar and

the

"Boy Magician," was simply a stage

suits and he did a

Kid Colt, Apache Kid, Whip Wilson, Wyatt
Earp and, possibly his best one, The Ringo Kid. His
approach was both gritty and romantic, similar to that of

Westerns were one of his strong

great

the later Spaghetti Westerns. While seeing to

Edd

who did

Cartier

that the

who

hewn, he also paid attention to his villains, sidekicks, and

They were rarely stock figures and were always well defined individuals.
His Black Knight, a medieval epic that appeared
briefly in the middle 1950s, was also impressive. Robert
Jennings, a comics historian, has said of Maneely that
"he surpassed all his previous work with the Black
Knight. The historical background was rendered up with
fine line detail and a careful attention to accuracy. Romantic realism is perhaps the best way to describe it."
In addition to all his chores for Marvel, he found time
to do several careful and impressive jobs for DCs crime
and fantasy titles. He also drew a humorous Sunday
page, with script by Stan Lee. Mrs. Lyons' Cubs, dealing
with a den mother and her charges, was syndicated by

illusionist

bit players.

first-rate

The Shadow, Doc Savage, Unknown, and Astounding had a brief fling in some of the same comic
books. Maneely seems to have been influenced by the
older artist, particularly in his inking and in his slightly
less than serious approach to depicting adventure and

work

it

cowboy heroes were acceptably handsome and rough-

in

ceptional pulp illustrator

many

billed as

amateur detection. RD possessed real magic

powers and, accompanied by a Chinese sidekick and a
Komodo dragon lizard, tangled with all sorts of mystical
threats in a variety of oriental settings. At about the time
Maneely commenced his Street & Smith career, the exdabbled

instead.

ble.

Red Dragon

man

hoped

These included horror, Western, science fiction, jungle, war, crime, historical, romance, and
funny animal. He also contributed to Riot and Wild,
short-lived imitations of Mad.
In the middle 1950s, when some of the older Marvel
heroes made a not-too-successful try at a comeback,
Maneely drew covers for such titles as Sub-Mariner. He
turned out, as mentioned above, hundreds of covers in
the fifties. His design sense was strong, his figure work
good, and he'd developed a distinctive style of inking
one utilizing considerably quirky feathering. Marvel
often used his striking covers to package interior art by
others that was only a few staggering steps from passa-

individual style. Fast he was, but also, almost always,

good.
Pennsylvania-bom, he studied at Philadelphia's Hussian School of Art and later worked on that city's Daily
News. He did his first comic book work in 1948, when
Smith
he was twenty-two. That was for such Street
titles as Super Magician Comics, Red Dragon, and The
Shadow. It's probable that this earliest material was
done for an art shop in the Philadelphia area that was
fronted by William de Grouchy, who was also editing the
S&S comics line.
While there Maneely drew Nick Carter, miscellaneous
historical fillers, the Red Dragon, and Tao Anwar. Both

were magicians. Tao, a full-grown young

the dozens of other categories Marvel

in

sell

in

fantasy.

Maneely began his association with Marvel in the late

1940s and eventually moved to the New York area.
Throughout most of the 1950s he was one of the stars
of the Marvel bullpen. Since the fifties was not a decade
in which superheroes thrived, Maneely was kept busy

Field Enterprises.

Maneely was

Long

64

killed in

Island Railroad.

1958

He was

in

fall

from a car of the

just thirty-two years old.

SPEED
CARTER
THIS IS 2075/ CAPTAIN SPEED
CARTER OF THE SPACE SENTINELS
FACES THE GREATEST PERIL OF
THE AGE. ..THE VICIOUS BIROMEN
WHOSE POWERFUL WINGS MAKE
THEM THE MOST ELUSIVE FOE
EVER TO CHALLENGE THE
EXISTENCE OF THE UNITED
PLANETS PEACE ORGANIZATION/

v/rtw.
dependable science fiction mode. (Copyright
Comics Group.)
Marvel
Corp. and

Maneely

in his

1953 Cornell Publishing

Jesse Marsh
Neither fame nor fortune ever touched him. He spent
over twenty years in comic books, drawing some of the
best-known characters, real and fictional, in the world
Tarzan, Gene Autry, Davy Crockett and managed to
remain virtually unknown. Marsh died two decades ago,
and in the intervening years little attention has been paid
to the enormous amount of work that he produced. He
was, however, a very gifted and highly individual artist.
His qualities, for the most part, were more appreciated
by his employers and some of his colleagues than by the
average reader. Fellow Tarzan artist Russ Manning was
a great champion of Marsh's work. He described it,
some years after Marsh's death, as "original, unique,
resolutely noncommercial, non-'comic book,' finely de-

signed."

Manning

also said,

"The best of

his

work

ap-

peals today only to those able to appreciate cultures

other than that of comic books."

a surprise."
One of the areas where Marsh excelled was in his
settings
the jungles, forests, veldts, the lost cities, the
hidden valleys where prehistoric monsters still roamed.
His Africa wasn't the fantasy land of the Sunday pages
and the movies, but a real place, albeit rich with romance
and mystery. Nobody drew blacks as well as Marsh or
with such an eye for variety and individuality, and his

Marsh lived in Southern California and all his comic

book work was done for the Dell-Western offices there.
He moved into comics while still employed as a story
man at the Walt Disney Studios. He'd gone to work for
Disney in 1939, when he was in his early thirties, and
was one of the many contributors to such full-length
animated features as Fantasia, Pinocchio, and Make
Mine Music. His first job in comics was drawing Gene
Autry,

initially

singing

for a series of one-shots

cowboy and then

commenced

in

women were
somewhat

about the popular

the regularly issued

title

dump him

for years. Although a consideraMaxon, Marsh was certainly not in

the Foster-Hogarth camp. He was much closer to the
lushly inked realistic style favored by Caniff and Noel
Sickles. He proceeded to draw a book-length Tarzan
adventure that was unlike anything seen before by jungleman buffs. A second book didn't follow until the next
year, but sales must eventually have been satisfactory,
because early in 1948 a bimonthly was launched. Marsh
was the artist, and he remained with the magazine for
over 150 issues. "It was Tarzan that opened up his
talents and my eyes," Toth has said. "New broad picturemaking vistas, encompassing the whole of Africa and its
peoples, tribes, costumes, customs, terrain, and wildlife,
put him on the map for me. It was a delight to see him
grow, with the series established as a hit each issue was

syndicate to

bly better artist than

and
comic book

distinctive

rare in

real.

He had

artists,

to

the

draw the

ability,

figure

ease or performing simple everyday actions. His Jane

was especially fine, not only fighting side by side with her

that

at

1946. Alex Toth, another long-time

this time and was
immediately impressed by his "rather low-key style of
storytelling
so far afield from the wild and woolly New
York City-based artwork. ... I realized Jesse was one to
in

Marsh admirer, discovered him about

mate against the latest threat to the peace of the jungle,

but preparing a meal, spearfishing, or simply sitting in a
woodland clearing. The character that gave him the
most trouble was Tarzan himself. Toth has commented
on the problems Marsh had with the jungle lord's anatomy and said, "Tarzan was, it seems, a chore for him."
Marsh produced a great many other comics. There
were Westerns Roy Rogers, Rex Allen, Annie Oakley
movie adaptations, and even Burroughs's John
Carter of Mars. He worked very fast, which explains
how he was able to produce a Sunday page based on
the current Disney movies Robin Hood, Swiss Famfor many years along
ily Robinson, Rob Roy,
etc.

watch."
In 1946 Dell decided to try a Tarzan comic book that
would offer brand new material instead of the newspaper reprints issued by previous publishers. Marsh was
chosen to be the artist. It was an unconventional choice,
since up until this time Tarzan had almost always been
drawn in the heroic, larger-than-life manner established
by Hal Foster and carried on and inflated by Bume
Hogarth. True, Rex Maxon hadn't exactly followed their
path on the daily strip, but Edgar Rice Burroughs
loathed his work and had been urging the newspaper

with his comic

book

vote his time to painting.

66

He retired
He died the

output.

in

1965

to de-

following year.

BLIT WE WON'T BE
HERE LONG.'TAezAN

COME LOOKING
FO US ON

WILL

An example
Burroughs,

of Marsh's

Inc.

way

with figures and foliage. (Copyright

All rights reserved)

1959 Edgar Rice

Sheldon Mayer
graphy and fantasy and that some of the truest-seeming
elements are the most unreal. The urban area Scribbly

While the majority of boys growing up in the late 1930s

and early 1940s no doubt wanted to be stunt pilots,
baseball stars, movie cowboys, and swing musicians
when they reached the adult state, there must have been
a small multitude who yearned to be professional cartoonists. Several comic books of the period acknowledged this dedicated minority. Tip Top Comics, for instance, provided two pages each issue where amateurs,
after competing with the frenzied enthusiasm of gladiators, might see their work in print. Other magazines
offered similar contests, cartoon tips, and drawing les-

was a somewhat sanitized version of the one

Mayer grew up in. "East Harlem
was a rough, tough
inhabited

neighborhood in those days. Kids began to think about

what they were going to do for a living from the day they
were bom, because everybody wanted to get out of there
as soon as possible."
Scribbly next showed up in Ail-American Comics, one
of a string of titles Gaines and Mayer put together for
DC. In the real world, meanwhile, Mayer was knee deep
in supermen
Green Lantern, the Flash, Hawkman, and
the entire Justice Society. He needed a place to comment on some of the sillier aspects of the super life and

sons.

But best of all there was Scribbly. Scribbly was a

boy cartoonist created by Mayer when he was nineteen
and still a boy cartoonist himself. The feature began in
the second issue of The Funnies (November, 1936). The
magazine, along with Popular Comics and later The
Comics, was a sixty-four-page compilation of newspaper
strip reprints that M. C. Gaines was producing to cash
in on the just-commencing comic book boom. "I went to
work for M. C. Gaines in January of 1936," Mayer recalls. "I had been up to see him the previous summer
and half a year later he gave me a call and offered me
a few days of paste-up work. started pasting up newspaper strips in comic book format." His Scribbly pages
were laid out like Sunday pages, each with its own logo.

decided the place to do that was

in his

own

Scribbly

Thus the Red Tornado was bom. One of the few

female costumed heroes of the day, she soon came to
dominate the strip. Any heroine who wore red flannels,
bedroom slippers, and an inverted stew pot for a mask
was bound to attract attention.
Mayer abandoned Scribbly in the middle 1940s to
concentrate on editing. He did some drawing for Funny
pages.

Stuff, turning

out the

fifth

issue of the funny animal

title

on his own. After stepping down as a DC editor,

he drew all sorts of funny animal strips Bo Bunny,
Doodles Duck, The Three Mousketeers, etc. His other
major creation came along in 1956. Sugar & Spike was
unlike other kid comics. Its two toddler stars weren't
entirely

Mayer did

this so his upstart filler could rub shoulders

undetected with the real Sunday pages.
"Scribbly was a thing I dreamed up during my lunch
hour one day in a noisy cafeteria," Mayer has said. "I
followed the old rule of writing only about what you
know. What was more natural than writing about the
adventures of a boy cartoonist?" Mayer had dreamed of
being a professional cartoonist for as long as he could
remember, and he wasn't going to content himself with
the recycling of other people's strips.
The feature was drawn in a style that was appealing,
exuberant and, you might say, scribbly. The saga dealt
with Scribbly J ibbet, who was young, diminutive, bespectacled, and possessed of a head of hair like an untidy
haystack. He was intent on breaking free of the bonds
put upon him by home, school, and contemporaries and
entering into that charmed world of newspaper cartooning. Mayer has said that the strip was a blend of autobio-

even able to

talk yet, or

so the unimaginative adults

around them thought. Actually they communicated

quite well with each other. This helped them get through
the wild and fantastic adventures they had. Mayer had
enormous fun with the nearly 100 issues of this book he
wrote and drew, alternating simple everyday continuities
with slapstick and complex fantasy. "His style was always so intensely personal to these characters," writer

Mark Evanier has

wouldn't be themever seemed more

indispensible to his features than Sheldon Mayer."
In recent years, after some time off because of eye
trouble, Mayer has been drawing again. He produced
Spike material for overseas markets and
new Sugar
did covers for digest reprints of their adventures in this
country. It's possible he'll be reviving them again soon.
selves in

&

68

said, "that they

any other motif.

No

artist

From an episode

of

Pages. (Copyright

J.

Worthington Blimp, Esq that ran. unbeknownst to Mayer,

1936 Comics Magazine Company.

Inc.)

in

Funny

Mort Meskin
By the time he went to work for
1940, his style had improved greatly. A thoughtful artist, he gave considerable attention to how best to
stage the less-than-brilliant scripts he was called upon to
illustrate for Zip Comics, Pep Comics, Blue Ribbon, etc.
His shots were carefully selected to keep the action
flowing and it should come as no surprise that after

is one of the most gifted and

appreciated cartoonists ever to work in comics. An
artist's artist, highly thought of by such colleagues as Gil
Kane, Alex Toth, and Jerry Robinson, he never managed
to excite the sort of mass audience needed to guarantee

Beyond a doubt Meskin

the Eisner-Iger shop.

least

MLJ

stardom.

There are perhaps several reasons for this. Meskin

subtler, less flamboyant artist than some of his
contemporaries. And it was his fate never to be assigned
the front-running heroes. While others in the 1940s were
gaining attention with Batman, Green Lantern, and the
Flash, he had to be content with back-up characters like
Johnny Quick, Vigilante, and Starman. Basically shy, he
seems content to let his work speak for itself and has
never attended a comics convention or participated in a
panel discussion. He doesn't even enjoy being interviewed and will only talk to interviewers over the phone,
never face to face. As a result little has been written
about him in the burgeoning fan press in the years since
he left comics for the better-paying field of advertising.
The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide does include

was a

him among the eighty or so

"better artists"

leaving comics he

and soldiers of
banana was the Wizard, MLJ's moustached answer to Superman.
He left MLJ, the future home of Archie, in 1941 and
went to DC for a long stay. This was the comic book
equivalent of switching from the Republic studios to
MGM. His earliest assignment was Vigilante, a feature
he drew from its debut in Action # 42 late in 1941
through the autumn of 1946. The character, an urban

are usually slim

cliff-hanging adventures of the jungle

Jumbo

Comics.

He

and

Simon

and Kirby were doing. "Mort took what might otherwise

have been just another middle-class hero series and
transformed

it

Jim Steranko

into a strip of terrific visual literacy," says

History of the Comics, "one with

and crackle. ... He experimented, developed a new set of comic book tricks, and deplored the
use of 'stock shots.' " Meskin was equally inventive with
Johnny Quick, "the King of Speed," in More Fun Comics and with Wildcat in Sensation.
Leaving DC for a spell, he teamed up with Jerry
Robinson to do the Black Terror and the Fighting
Yank for the Ned Pines line. These two lackluster
heroes never looked so good. In the fifties and sixties,
like many others, Meskin drew crime, romance, science
fiction, and horror. There are fine stories from these
years, but some of the work looks hurried and dispirited. While even a less-than-inspired Meskin page is
better than most, much of his later work simply doesn't
match what he was doing in the forties. He left comics
for good two decades ago and went into advertising.

genuine

realisti-

illustrating the

amazon Sheena

constructing splash panels that rivalled anything

fiction illustration for

comic book job was

closest thing to a top

fighting crime, apparently inspired Meskin. His

drawing got even better although, for some reason, he
had a difficult time getting his hero's Stetson to sit
straight on his head in the early episodes
and he began

Astounding, but what Meskin liked best

were the graceful, impressionistic drawings he did in The
Shadow in the 1930s. Stoops was the premier illustrator
in Blue Book, an adventure pulp that attracted a great
many excellent artists. His black-and-white interior work,
with impressive figure work, layouts, and lighting, made
a strong and lasting impression on Meskin.

Though Meskin women

The

cowboy

whose work

Unknown and

cally built, his first

pages; they

his

crimefighters, detectives, jungle boys,

fortune.

and science

MLJ

enthusiasm and are full of surprising and

unconventional graphics. He took care of costumed

convey

pointed out in the listing of comic book titles, but he

is one of those who gets a nod only for his "most noted
work" and not his entire output.
Morton Meskin was bom in Brooklyn in 1916 and got
his basic art training at the Pratt Institute and the Art
Students League. Equally important to his education
were newspaper comics Alex Raymond and Milton
Caniff were his favorites and pulp magazines. He's
said he was much influenced by two of the most talented
pulp illustrators of the thirties and forties, Edd Cartier
and Herbert Morton Stoops. Cartier did a considerable
of fantasy

went to an advertising agency to do

storyboards. There's a freshness to his

is

amount

in

in

did that in 1938, while working in

70

in his

vitality

A WAD OF
MONEY, 8A8S' WE

I'VE <&OT

COULD MAKE A
CLEAN START IN
SOME SMALL TOWN-

ONLY- ONLY-- I'LL

ALWAYS LIVE IN
FEAR OF THE LAW.

An

impressive piece of teamwork, with Meskin pencilling and Jerry Robinson inking.

(Copyright

1948

Visual Editions, Inc.)

"

Frank Miller
Frank Miller has been a popular name for cartoonists.
There was the Frank Miller who drew the Barney Baxter
newspaper strip and Frank Miller of the Des Moines

aroused
ers.

a Pulitzer Prize for his political cartoons. Our Frank Miller was born in 1957, long after the
Golden Age had ended, and is one of the more innovative and/or controversial storytellers of the 1980s.
He began his professional career at age twenty, moving up from fanzine work. "I was born in Maryland. My
parents moved to Vermont when I was a very small
child," he has said. "I lived there until I was twenty." His
fascination with comics commenced early on. "I grew up

more

have

built his

1950s,

Miller

has

Undaunted, Miller continued. His 1982 Wolverine

up more controversy, as did his Ronin miniseries

stirred

done

Ronin.

one of

telling

the following year.

had a wonderful

feel

my

everything

Of

this latter

book,

freedom doing
stories can come from everything
see, and everything I've lived
feeling of

through."

Most recently he has returned to Daredevil as writer,

and done an Elektra graphic novel and a special Batman
miniseries. With the venerable caped crusader Miller
wanted to get back to basics. "I see Batman as a quasimystical character," he explains. "He's also unrelentingly

someone who, when he was very young,

world demolished so that it no longer
made sense. Now he's forcing the world to make sense.
Superhero comics have forgotten what they are.
They've become so built on their own padding that
people have forgotten the basic appeal and the basic
purpose of these characters." These works show
Miller continuing to experiment with new layouts and
new ways of telling his stories. "If the comic is just a
weakened, watered-down version of someone else's
vision, if it's a remake of something old," he feels,
"you're not going to get the emotion or the value. That's
why it's important that a lot more experimental and
radical work happen. Things have got to bust open."
had
.

multipaneled

some-

times cut a tier in to a half-dozen or so frames. Every

decade or so a few young artists will come along and
is

Now

in

righteous. He's

vertically, horizontally,

reexamine the established ways of

read,

personal style from a

experimented with

DC

for

Miller says, "I

Eisner,

them up

"[Not]

culture kitsch.

Krigstein, martial arts movies,

pages. He's sliced

the medium";
cinematics and

skillfully exploits

an interpretation of life or an imaginative counterpoint

life, but an interpretation of various forms of pop

Japanese prints, Bernard

and European artists like
Moebius and Guido Crepax. He has been always very
much aware that page breakdowns can be used to control and manipulate time. Like Krigstein at EC in the

wide range of sources

"Miller
"Neo-Eisnerian
hysteria

to

the Marvel scene like a bombshell."

to

among readers and review-

panelogical underscorings"; and further attacks

seems

emotions

praise

scholarly

as a comic book junkie," Miller admits. "I think that came

from being miserable in Vermont, from being a maladjusted child." As for his art background, he says, "I've had
classes in art, but I've not had formal, regimented trainknow about
ing. I've probably learned most of what
drawing from reading and from working in the field."
His first published work appeared in the Twilight
Zone comic book in 1977. But it was with long-time
superhero Daredevil, which he took over in the spring
of 1979, that Miller began to attract attention, praise and
some violent critical reaction. Marvel got things rolling
by introducing him with the modest statement, "From
time to time a truly great new artist will explode upon
Miller

sorts of

violence and the thoughtful layouts, which

sometimes looked too calculated and showboating, all

touched off responses. These ranged from "Miller's
comics are the greatest comics that have been done in
the history of mankind" to "At best, modestly entertaining work." As he continued with the book he garnered

who won

Register

all

The

a story. Miller

those.

His Daredevil, and especially the character Elektra,

72

his entire

A sample
right

of Miller's cinematic style featuring Elektra. his

1981 Marvel Comics Group.)

most popular character. (Copy-

Bob Montana
Montana

remembered

is

for just

one

roughest distance between two points

creation: that im-

probable and perennial teenager, Archie Andrews. In the

early 1940s, though, before the redheaded Archie came
to dominate his life, he was a prolific and versatile comic
book artist. In those days Montana applied his foursquare, uncluttered style to superheroes, detectives,
crimebusters, and even other teenagers.
He was bom in 1920 in Stockton, California, into a

show

business family.

He once

and "did rope

said he

was

Boston, and

not Jughead,

few months

thrown

line in

1941, drawing such second-banana

characters.

Montana

During

II.

His

also contributed quite

MLJ during the early years of World War

intricate covers, rich with voluptuous women in
Nazi fiends, slavering Japanese, machine

guns, knives, branding irons, and brightly

costumed

su-

perheroes making hairbreadth rescues, graced Zip, TopNotch, Jackpot, and Pep.
Archie himself arrived on the scene late in 1941,
showing up just about simultaneously in Pep # 22 and
Jackpot # 4. The first splash panel in Pep showed Archie
and Betty barreling along in a red rattletrap of a car.
"Hang onto your hats, Riverdale," warned the first caption.

"Here comes

jallopy! Betty

the horn

ARCHIE

with his

first

jumpin'

The
life

animated style on Archie,

and other pen techniques that
cartoon courses for years. Most

some

comic book versions of the

slapstick

sort of thing

his early years with Archie, in

between drawing

Montana found time

to do some work for his old mentor Bob Wood. For the
Gleason line, edited by Wood and Charles Biro, he did
Dickie Dean, dealing with a boy inventor, and Whirlwind, about a boxer. He also managed to turn out a few
gruesome jobs for the initial issues of Crime Does Not
Pay. Montana left comic books to enter the service and
spent four years in the Signal Corps, where he "made
training movies. Did hitch with Charles Addams, Co-

a few covers to
jeopardy,

Jackpot.

attractive,

staple of

jalopies, jukeboxes,

in

Wonderland. For the Victor Fox outfit he worked,

anonymously, on Spark Stevens, Lu-Nar, and other un-

memorable

in

in

slinking into Archie's

Henry Aldrich was up to on the radio. The Archie verlife was one a great many readers took to
and his star began to rise. The first issue of his own
magazine came out in the fall of 1942 and by late 1947
he'd nudged all the serious heroes out of Pep and was
its uncontested leading man. Eventually the MLJ company changed its name to Archie.

job was as assistant to

and Danny

debut over

in

mom. But

sion of teen

Bob Wood, who drew the Target and Silver Streak before coediting Crime Does Not Pay. He began soloing

MLJ

his

came

of the plots were pure sitcom, with

all

characters as the Fox, Inspector Bentley,

a ride with

later.

had been the

"raised in

fessional cartoonist.

for the

is

plump businessman dad was

who made

Montana used an

New

first

Archie's

favoring crosshatching

tricks in

According to Montana, his

ARCHIE!"

dark-haired Veronica

his life. He studied art in Arizona,

York, and by the time he was twentyone he was settled in Manhattan and working as a pro-

him

stuck with

the story, too, along with his understanding

Pop's Western act."

The habit of traveling that he picked up in his youth
vaudeville"

bean, Saroyan."
rals for

He

the Fort

and

jitterbugs,

He also claimed to have

Monmouth latrine."

painted "mu-

never returned to magazines after the army. In

1946 the Archie comic strip, daily and Sunday, began

and Montana devoted all his time to that. Over the
years his work became increasingly bland and hurriedlooking. Montana suffered a fatal heart attack in January of 1975 while skiing near his sixteen-acre home in

jivin'

Cooper says everything makes noise but

and right now she's finding out that the

New

74

Hampshire.

MEANWHILEJHE DELUGE
Cf DOGS BELEASED BY
ACCHIE ACE ROMPING

6AYLY THROUGH THE

STREETS

HE^S NICE, BUT He

DOESNT LOOK
LIKE A BLOOD-

HOUND

WITH ALL

.THOSE

SPOTS.',

THAT'S EASY
*vOD" PAINT THE SPOTS

WHfTE AN

I'LL

>

MA<E

MEANWHILE- BACK

LINES ON HIS FACE

SO HE'LL LOOK *<VERV

,SAD

An exuberant and
Publications. Inc.)

enthusiastic early Archie

IN HIS

OFFICE (FOR A PA\R OF PANTS)

THE MAYOR IS BEING DE-

LUGED BY ANGRY PHONE

[CALLS

10*

page. (Copyright

1986 Archie Comic

Klaus Nordling
Although a cartoonist for most of his
active in newsstand comic books for

life,

little

her debut in the weekly Spirit section in 1940. When

Nick Cardy, the second artist on the feature, was drafted
in 1942, Eisner summoned Nordling to take over.
Eisner's studio was in Manhattan. "They were in a jam,"
Nordling recalls. "So I dashed off in the middle of winter, left my wife and kids in Minnesota, to come take over
Lady Luck. " He hadn't been following the adventures of
the debutante Robin Hood, and Eisner didn't give him
much in the way of advice. "He just showed me a couple
of strips from before. ... I just studied them and mulled
it over for awhile. And thought, well, this stuff is too
straight. I liked to have a little comedy in there ... so I
suggested what I'd like to do with it to Will. And he said,
'Sure, go ahead.' " What Nordling did was convert the
feature to a screwball mystery-comedy, mixing crime and
satire. Historian Catherine Yronwode has said that he's
the one "whom most fans think of as the definitive Lady

Nordling was
more than a

remembered as the artist who drew

Lady Luck, which he took over
in 1942 and drew off and on until 1950. He has an
individual, cartoony style and a screwball sense of
humor. The adventure stories he turned out in the forties
were unlike anyone else's, and in their own way were as
inventive and distinctive as those of his long-time coldecade.

He

is

best

the definitive version of

league Will Eisner.

Nordling is a self-taught cartoonist: "I started doodling
when was a kid." He was bom in Finland in 1915 and
came to the United States as a child. His parents settled
in Brooklyn in the area then known as Fintown. He
worked for Alexander King's satiric magazine
Americana, drew a weekly comic strip about Baron
Munchausen, and got into comic books in 1939.
As Nordling recalls, he signed on with the Eisner-Iger
shop at about the time it was starting up. His first assignment was Shorty Shortcake, a mock adventure done in
animated cartoon style for Fox's Wonderworld Comics.
He soon added more serious fare, taking over Spark
Stevens, a strip about a daredevil sailor, from Bob Kane.
This also ran in Wonderworld. The shop supplied the
contents of the Fiction House magazine as well, and
Nordling drew Strut Warren, Powder Bums, and
Greasemonkey Griffin for such titles as Fight Comics
and Wings. He usually worked at home, doing all the
writing and drawing himself
"lettering, erasing, everyI

Luck

He

&

the

Baron

"three
to

four years,

Nordling returned to the strip at this point, contributing

new stories to the magazine's five issues.
The Barker was a somewhat unlikely comic book
hero. Created by Jack Cole and writer Joseph Millard,
he first showed up in National # 42 (May, 1944). Nordling took over the drawing and writing shortly thereafter.
This strip about a traveling circus, its personnel, and its
unusual adventures as it moved across the country inspired Nordling to some of his most ambitious, and
amusing, stories. National folded a few months before
Lady Luck, and by 1950 Nordling was out of comic
books.
Or at least traditional comics. He spent the next
several years working with Eisner on industrial and
educational comic books. Still active today, he devotes most of his time to commercial cartooning.

he contributed Crash,

'bunch of
adventure tradition"
Speed Comics and an
unlikely superhero named the Thin Man to Marvel's
Mystic Comics. Through Eisner he also began working
for the Quality line. He did Bob
Swab in Hit Comics,
Shot Shell in Military, and Kid Dixon in National. His
most successful creation was Pen Miller, which ran in
National and then Cracks. Pen was a cartoonist-detective, a "nemesis of the underworld." Nordling admits the
blond pipe-smoking sleuth was loosely based on himself.
"I never had adventures like that. But, yes, everybody
said he looked like me."
Lady Luck, alias socialite Brenda Banks, had made
pals'

initially for

200 four-page adventures before stepping aside. Like Eisner, Nordling became fascinated with
integrating his logo into the splash panel, and one of the
pleasures of following the weekly episodes was in seeing
how the words "Lady Luck" would fit into both the
design of the page and the opening of the story. Commencing with # 42 (April, 1943), Lady Luck was reprinted in Smash Comics. She outlasted the magazine,
which became Lady Luck with # 86 (December, 1949).

thing."
Fairly prolific in the early 1940s,

stayed with the character

turning out over

Cork

artist."

flyers in the old

&

&

76

Imaginative layouts plus the characteristic Nordling sense of humor. (Copyright

Will Eisner.)

1986

George Perez
He's
in

come a long way in the past ten years. Perez's entry

Who ofAmerican Comic Books, published

developed a reputation. The subtleties develwere absent, but the power was definitely
there." He also feels that another thing he had going for
him was "a natural storytelling ability which seemed to

sudden

oped

The Who's

1975, took up only six lines. In the years since then

added considerably to his list of credits and to his
reputation. During the Golden Age of the 1940s, artists
and writers labored unheralded and unsung. Today, with
in

he's

An

early favorite of his

was Super-

Swan. A later
was Jack
Kirby's Marvel work. "Starting from Swan, I went
through a Kirby period and even Steve Ditko very
briefly,
just loved the way Ditko did hands," he says.
"Then others that followed were Steranko, Neal Adams,
Barry Smith, Gil Kane, Mort Drucker, and many others."
Perez was bom in the South Bronx and in the early
1970s began to attend comics conventions in the Manhattan area. He was able to show his samples to professionals, and in 1973 he was hired to assist Rich Buckler.

man

as rendered by the dependable Curt

influence,

one he was exposed

to in his teens,

After parting with Buckler, Perez starting pencilling

rectly for Marvel.

"When Marvel

got a hole

in

di-

their

had no one to
no one wanted to draw anyway. They
gave it to me." The feature was Man-Wolf in Creatures
on the Loose and, fairly soon, the magazine's sales
schedule," he's explained, "they suddenly

draw a feature

transcend most of the flaws in my drawing."

Perez continued to be an impressive and productive
penciller for the next several years, but then he reached
a point where he had to stop for a while. "It felt great
doing all those books, but I think it might have been too
much for any one person to take on." Part of his comeback effort was the work he did on both the X-Men and
Fantastic Four annuals in the late 1970s. He then
teamed up with editor-writer Marv Wolfman to rejuvenate the venerable Teen Titans. Perez changed with his
job and he feels he was able "to prove I can handle
stories with characters and characterization, as opposed
to always having slam-bang action." The New Teen Titans became a runaway hit. And, as Amazing Heroes
puts it, "The Titans have gone on to achieve a place in
the hearts of fans, enthusiasts, and pros alike that had
not been achieved by a new DC book for many, many
years ... a far-reaching series whose simplicity and
involvement have attracted new fans and rejuvenated
the interest of old readers."
Perez gave up the Titans in 1984 to work with Wolfman on Crisis on Infinite Earths, the maxiseries designed to redefine the DC universe. More ambitious in
scope and casting than both parts of Marvel's Secret
Wars combined, the book has given Perez ample opportunity to be both powerful and subtle. The issues are full
of action, characterization ("The characters move in the
way characters should move, in contrast to everyone
having interchangeable poses," says Perez), vast and detailed landscapes, and seascapes and cityscapes. Perez is
also a master of crowd control. In this maxiseries in
particular he has been able to jam dozens of DC heroes
and heroines into some of his panels and still make each
and every one of them a recognizable individual. After
Crisis, he plans to do more special projects graphic
novels, and a new version of Wonder Woman.
It looks like his comeback will be permanent.

an abundance of fanzines and specialty publications

around, that situation has changed. Perez is one of the
fan's favorite artists, and only John Byrne has been able
to beat him in the polls. Comics Scene once said, "He
has helped redefine the way team comics are handled
and has brought back some of the energy and excitement missing from the comics." Amazing Heroes described his work as having both "power and subtlety."
He is a product of the comics generation, self-taught
and inspired originally by the art he saw in the comic
books themselves. "I've been drawing since was five
years old," he's said.

later

that

picked up. Shortly thereafter Perez graduated to such

better-known heroes as the Fantastic Four and the
Avengers. "Looking back," he says of his work from that
period, "my style was pretty much Marvel house style
very large, thick characters, very musclebound, not very
flexible. But I was learning to do layouts and all of a

78

DOWN!

A rare Perez page from Man Wolf, his first professional solo feature. Script by David Kraft,
inks by R. Villamonte. (Copyright

1978 Marvel Comics Group.)

Wendy
The
was

earliest attention Pini

gained from comic book fans

for a rather unusual achievement.

sulted not

from her

Her

our loan within two months. 10,000

is high for a beginwe're over 50,000."

Pini's fantasy world and her appealing characters

ning project

celebrity re-

writing, her pencilling, or her inking,

of the

Coast comics conventions

in

the late 1970s.

Thome

outfit, and Pini donned a metal-and-wire bikini that

weighed approximately nine pounds. Some of the earliest mentions of her most important achievement in the
field appeared in fanzine and newspaper accounts of

is

One

such, for instance,

artist

whose

latest

but

now

Leetah, Cutter, etc. proved to be marketable. Posters,

a novel, albums, and reprints followed the comic book.
The critical reaction to her work was also favorable for
the most part. Writing in The Comics Journal in the
spring of 1982, Jan Stmad said, "Wendy depends
more on minor detail than on major revelations to give
her characters life, showing us the way they move,
stand, sit, fidget, and engage in their day-to-day activities.
Like a well-crafted film that draws us into the
story and manipulates our emotions without obvious
artifice, Wendy's Elfquest solicits our sympathies qui-

himself portrayed the Wizard, decked out in a Merlin

those sword-and-sorcery shows.

said of her, "She is also a comic

like that,

like Red Sonja and appearing in

shows Frank Thome was staging at East

but from dressing up

some

Pint

work

the 'Elfquest' character to be published next year."

which deals not with a single character but

first appeared in 1978 as
a black-and-white alternate press comic book. Its subsequent sales have been most impressive and Pini, aided
by her husband Richard, has achieved the sort of success
with her homemade comic book that seems typically
American the sort of thing brought off in earlier generations by pioneering dreamers who invented a new kind
of automobile or sewing machine.
"I came up vith the idea for Elfquest in 1977," she

By 1984 Amazing Heroes was enenough to proclaim that Elfquest was "one
of the most radically original and widely acclaimed
works of fiction of the past twenty years." They added,
"It's far more than the tale of how elves first came
among humans
what Elfquest presents us with is a
world peopled by our most intrinsic selves, unchained
from the uniform pettiness of this world and living the

1984, "presented the idea to Richard, and

he liked it. began drawing the series without any real
idea of how we were going to get it published. We took
a package to both Marvel and DC. They rejected it as not
being commercial enough." The first issue was finally
brought out by an alternate publisher, but the Pinis were
not happy with the deal. "We decided we would gamble

fully to

Elfquest,

etly,

with an entire imagined world,

explained

unobtrusively."

thusiastic

utmost heights of dream."

She's been singled out as "the

in

book

present her

field." Pini is

own

first

woman

success-

epic-length series in the comic

aware that she's thrived

in

an area

was long considered to be for men (and boys)

only. "The nature of the comic book audience has
changed over the past twenty years," she says. "Elf-

that

quest boasts the highest percentage of female readers

of any comics series currently on the market. I say this
with ill-concealed pride and the results of a widesweeping demographic survey in hand. E/fquest's audience is, in fact, almost equally divided between male
and female readers in their late teens and early twenties. Whether this trend will continue with E/fquest's
newsstand distribution as a Marvel/Epic reprint remains to be seen, but suspect the pattern will hold."

and publish ourselves. Fortunately, we knew two diswho were both very supportive
With a little
financial help from friends and relatives, we borrowed
money to get off the ground. We put out our first issue
with a press run of 10,000. Both distributors bought the
entire run, and Elfquest took off. Since then, every issue
has increased its press run, and we were able to pay back
tributors

80

quiet

moment

Graphics, Inc.)

with the elves says

more than words

could. (Copyright

1986 Warp

"

Bob Powell
Late in the 1930s Stanley Pulowski of Buffalo, New
York, came to Manhattan. He changed his name to Bob
Powell and began a career in comics that lasted nearly
three decades. Almost from the start Powell had a distinctive and completely professional style. That and the
fact that he was fast and enterprising contributed to his

own, based
I

fills

the Eisner-Iger shop.

eight pages.

Powell's earliest credits are for

work he did while

He drew such

features as Dr.

at

Fung

in Wonderworld Comics, D-13, Secret Agent in Mystery

Men, and Landor, Maker of Monsters in Speed Comics.
He did Gale Allen for Planet Comics and Sheena, his
best-known early character, for Jumbo. It was on these
latter strips that Powell began to demonstrate his affinity
for drawing pretty women, a knack he would refine and

more

One

artists."

girl

was The

He was particularly effective with

characters like Black Cat

got too goddam ancient, enlisted,"

eventually became an air force
instructor, "which kept me out of the shooting war."

great

He was able to do some cartooning while in the service

and returned to it just as soon as he was mustered out
in 1945. "I was still in uniform when the Harveys put
me right back to work." Perhaps inspired by memories
of his days with Eisner, he now set up a shop of his

flyer,

so before

he once

recalled.

Nostrand.

most

Man

interesting creations of this pe-

in Black. Essentially

ows.
Powell continued in the fifties and sixties to turn out
an enormous amount of work, including a short-lived
revival of The Man in Black in the mid 1950s. He was
also responsible for Bobby Benson s B-Bar-B Riders, Jet
Powers, Cave Girl, Thundda, Sub-Mariner, The Hulk,
Robin Hood, Red Hawk, an adaptation of The Red
Badge of Courage, and even a comic book about Pope
Pius XII.
In addition he put in a year on the Bat Masterson
comic strip ("I hated it"), drew gum cards for Topps, and
served as art director for Sick. During his last years he
worked in commercial art, bitter that the collapse of a

and the Blonde

Bomber. Powell's women were getting sexier and more
zaftig. They were usually wide-shouldered, long-haired,
long-legged, and full-chested, borrowing attributes from
such 1940s movie goddesses as Rita Hayworth, Betty
Grable, and Jane Russell.
Powell entered the service in 1943. "I was hot to be

pretty

Howard

of Powell's

comic book verand sardonic tales to be heard on

radio shows like The Whistler and Suspense, the stories
were narrated by a shadowy tuxedoed and caped figure
also known as Fate. They appeared as fillers in assorted
Harvey magazines, and the continuities were nicely
staged, rich with unsettling angles and ominous shad-

were Lou Fine and Powell. During this

association Powell drew a variety of features, mostly for
the Quality line two of his specialties were women and
airplanes
and contributed a weekly four-page adventure of Mr. Mystic to Eisner's just-launched Spirit booklet. This one he also wrote. He parted with Eisner in the
early 1940s, apparently because he was unhappy over
his page rates, and went out on his own. In 1942 he
began an association with the Harvey Brothers that was
to last for fifteen years.

it never sold. The Powell product

was more imaginatively laid out and much
inked, perhaps due in part to the inking of

time, but

sions of the strange

Among them

lushly

the late
riod

took some of the good

of these years

When Eisner split with his partner to start a small shop

"I

same

at this

develop over the years.

of his own, he said,

Long Island home. "I had had an

war and now, with things booming,

took on several more. ... I did the writing, pencilling,

and the faces. Howard Nostrand and Marty Epp did
the inking. Marty also did lettering. George Siefringer
did backgrounds. Other casuals did cleanup, errands,
and created ulcers."
The shop did considerable work for such Harvey titles
as Speed Comics and nearly dominated the Street &
Smith titles of the late 1940s. Powell and associates
drew the Shadow providing the sexiest Margo Lane
ever seen in any medium Doc Savage, Red Dragon,
and a Nick Carter that has been called the definitive one.
Powell got up samples for a Nick Carter newspaper strip

becoming one of the most widely published artists in the

business. He eventually drew for just about every kind of
comic book jungle girl, Western, superhero, romance,
horror, etc.
and a list of his credits once compiled by
a dedicated fan

in his

assistant before the

He

many

of his comic

book publishers had

left

him

in

a rough position. "Finally I was able to break the style

of drawing and started earning a decent living and again

damn good one

do remember the years

would say, 'Ah, yes. Very
Mr. Powell, but you were a comic book artist,

of struggle
nice,

when

weren't- you?'

He

82

died

in

but, oh,

art directors

1967.

ALONE. MP MY5TIC SETS OUT

FOB THE VILLAGE OF THE
FABLED TWO HUNDRED YEAR
OLD OUEEN PANA Jp=
.

SPOTTING
VULTURES,

A HUGE

FLOCK OF
MR MVSTIC INVESTIG-

AND FINDS THE REMAINS

ATES

OF AN AMBUSHED SAFAPt

OOOOm

'

f.

PQQQ

CHAP, HE'S
t

SO THE QUEEN
IS UP TO HER
OLD TRICKS
OF STEALING

THE ROLLINS' EXPEDITION'

GOOD GOSH/ THERES NOT A
SOUL LEFT ALIVE.' THE GOLD
SHIPMENT IS GONE.TOO'J

MEANWHILE.
'

LOOK, OH QUEEN.'}

^V

JYE BRING GOLD/ LJ

GOLDTVE
GOT TO

HER ONCE
AND FOR
LiB ^HHks.
i^HMA>JBL

Wf

"

**

~*^C^B
P ^*

'

'

_^j2ir* -^"^***2 \a

w&%w
VOU HAVE DONE WELL,

FOR TWO

M*6AN6A,BUT STILL

HUNDRED

AM NOT

YEARS, l\

SATISFIED'!'

THIRSTED
FOR A HLK5E
POCK OF
|

GOLD

ID|

GIVE ANY

THING FDPrT.I
ANYTH/AX5'

Some

of his specialties

(Copyright

1986

on display

Will Eisner.)

pretty

girls,

jungle scenery,

and mystical heroes.

Mac Raboy
One of the most
slowest, of the

demanded all super-types be a living mass of muscle. His

Captain Marvel, Jr. looked like nothing more than a

Bom

fourteen-year-old."

in

in

Work

New

impressive artists, and undisputably the

Golden Age was Emanual "Mac" Raboy.
York City in 1916, he got his art training

pression years.

WPA

Notoriously slow, Raboy had several other artists ashim as he struggled to meet deadlines. Even so,
more than a few jobs reached print with nearly all the
Captain Marvel, Jr., figures nothing more than paste-

Projects Administration classes during the De-

He

did his

first

professional

work

for

sisting

commercial
where he did "all kinds of the usual dirty
work." In 1940 a newspaper ad lured him into the sweatshop of the enterprising Harry "A" Chesler nicknamed
"Chiseler" by some of his disgruntled employees and
he began what was to be an impressive career in comics.
Raboy's earliest stuff, back-up features in magazines
such as Prize Comics, Silver Streak, Master, and Whiz,
was not especially notable. It was competent and neat,
showing the influence of his idol Alex Raymond, but
projects, then got a job with a small

art service,

Raboy

make the average reader look twice or whistle

By 1941, though, he'd made a great
leap forward. This was most noticeable on Dr. Voodoo
in Fawcett's Whiz Comics. Begun by another artist, this
feature had originally been about a physician who works
with the natives of Africa. Soon after Raboy took over
it was changed into a time-traveling fantasy and came to
resemble a blend of Flash Gordon and Prince Valiant.
Like these handsome Sunday pages, there were no balnothing to

with admiration.

"The dragon's roars are

loons, only breathless captions

deafening, and
Dr.

Voodoo

its

breath melts the jagged stones

avoids this and

lithely leaps to

a bang, showing off

bravura best, and then sagged as a lesser
artist picked up the brush to rush out the rest of the yam.
Raboy was not reknowned for the dappemess of his
appearance. "He was," says Steranko, "considered a
sloppy dresser by his associates, and frequently developed several days' growth of beard before shaving. A
habitual chain smoker, Raboy always drew while a cigarette dangled from his mouth."
He left Fawcett in 1944 to join publisher Ken Crossen
and editor H. L. Gold in their new comic book venture.
Calling himself Spark Publications, prolific pulp writer
and long-time editor Crossen first put out Green Lama.
This was a character he'd created for the pulps a few
years earlier and adapted to comics originally in Prize
Comics. Raboy, who had taken a turn drawing the mystical green-clad hero in Prize, drew him again now along
with all the magazine's covers for its unsuccessful run of
ups.

but

few

stories started off with

at his

eight issues.

He

did one especially interesting story,

using doubletone paper to give depth and dimension to

his artwork, but still had trouble meeting his deadlines.

the ground."

Raboy had found his metier. He was at his best with

swashbuckling larger-than-life adventure, and his gracefully drawn and carefully inked figures were most at
home in the realms of fantasy.
After working on a number of other Fawcett heroes,
including Bulletman, Raboy was tapped to draw their
next intended star. Captain Marvel, Jr., made his debut
late in 1941 and Raboy drew most of his adventures in
Master Comics for the next two years. He also did the
covers for the magazine and for Captain Marvel, Jr.,
which came along late the following year. Raboy's covers are some of his most impressive work. They are well
designed, beautifully drawn, and often make use of
rather awesome perspectives. With his boy superhero
Raboy was somewhat innovative; as Steranko points
out, he "scorned the well-established comic axiom which

Raboy was rescued from comic book deadlines in

1948, when King Features hired him to take over the
Flash Gordon page from a weary Austin Briggs. From
then on Raboy had to worry only about producing
one Sunday page per week. Within a year after assuming the chore, he said, "All of a sudden,
find myself
with no ambition. Oh, I'm wrapped up in the work
on Flash Gordon, which I certainly get a kick out of,
but there's no burning desire in my mind any more to
do something that you could call really monumental.
My monument has been built." He was alluding to
the home he and his wife had built in New York's
Westchester County. He stayed with Flash Gordon until his death in 1967. His real monument is most certainly the work he did for Fawcett in the early 1940s.
I

84

One

of the

many handsome

Publications, Inc.)

covers he designed

in

the 1940s (Copyright

1944 Spark

Jerry Robinson
Appropriately enough for a fellow who began his comics career at the age of seventeen, Robinson's first job

was working

for

body generates atomic power?" Atoman proved to be a

dud, despite Robinson's handsome artwork, and he survived for but two issues. Robinson next teamed up with
Meskin to produce some striking stories for such heroes
as the Vigilante, the Black Terror, the Fighting Yank, and
Johnny Quick. These jobs were usually pencilled by Meskin and inked by Robinson. The 1950s found him doing
war, crime, and horror for Marvel as well as Lassie and
Bat Masterson for Western. By the time he left comics
in the early 1960s his style had become calmer and a bit

Bob Kane on Batman and assisting at

Boy Wonder. "I'd met Bob the

the birth of Robin the

summer

after

graduated from high school," he's

said.

were very popular with college kids, and students would paint all sorts
decorated my own, as
of razzmatazz on their jackets.
had been the cartoonist on my high school paper. I
was wearing this jacket while waiting to play tennis at
a resort when this fellow came up and asked who had
drawn the cartoons. He turned out to be Bob Kane
and he offered me a job as his assistant if was
willing to come to New York City. It seemed a great
way to pay my college expenses, so I moved to New
York and transferred to Columbia. ... I began lettering
the strip and inking the backgrounds. After a while, I
started to ink most of the figures as well, and pretty
soon Bob would just pencil the strip and I would do
the complete inking."
A natural artist, Robinson improved rapidly and was
soon soloing on Batman and Robin episodes. He also
began to be influenced by other cartoonists, especially
the gifted Mort Meskin, with whom he shared a studio
at one point. Robinson was Meskin's most successful
disciple; from 1939 into the early 1940s, his artwork
continually changed and improved. He eventually
changed the entire look of the Batman tales, culminating
in the covers and stories he did for Batman and Detective Comics in 1942 and 1943. He'd developed a personalized way of drawing figures, one that mixed the
heroic with a slight fantasy element, and his staging was
both inventive and effective. Most of all, Robinson gave
the impression he was enjoying himself.
Robinson drew a war-oriented mystery man known as
London for the original Daredevil in 1941. This was the
first thing he got to sign his name to. London worked in
Europe and specialized in thwarting Nazi spies, saboteurs, and supervillains. By the middle 1940s Robinson
had left Batman and was drawing the Green Homet for
the Harvey Brothers. In 1946 he drew an up-to-date
"In those days, white painter's jackets

In the

paper

hero

sedate.

named Atoman

"Who

is

this

fall

of

strip, for

1953 Robinson had done his first newsthe New York Herald Tribune's syndi-

cate. Jet Scott offered science fiction in

setting with a lanky, dark-haired hero

a contemporary
"not a

who was

ray-blasting space ranger but a scientific investigator for

the Pentagon."

The

scripts

were by Sheldon

Stark, a

veteran of both comics and radio. Robinson brought the

he had been developing in comic books to the

it some. Jet Scott had a sophisticated
look, and the women who inhabited it were slim and
stylish. Like many a Pentagon employee, Jet didn't limit
himself to home-ground adventures. He also journeyed
to exotic locales such as Saudi Arabia and the South
Seas, all of which Robinson depicted in his best cinestyle

project, refining

matic fashion. Despite

its

good

under two years.

Robinson began to turn

looks, the strip folded in

just

sixties.

He

did a

humor

his

back on adventure

in

the

panel, Still Life, in which inani-

mate objects held conversations (Check Book: The

bank was robbed
how much did they get? Pen: 57
toasters, 42 electric blankets, 69 pressure cookers, and
145 bath mats!). For the New York News, he commenced a funny Sunday page, still running, called Flubbs
.

&

Fluffs, illustrating bloopers allegedly made in the

classroom and elsewhere. In the 1970s he self-syndicated Life With Robinson, a satirical strip commenting

and

Robinson is a past president

and the author of a
history of comic strips. All in all, he is a man of many
accomplishments. For many, however, his greatest accomplishment was his comic book work of the 1940s.

on current

life

politics.

of the National Cartoonist Society

new man whose

86

52-PAGE MAGAZINE

THE VANISHING VANDALS

P(U4
OTHER FEATURES

One

of the relatively few superguys created in the middle 1940s. (Copyright

Spark Publications.)

1946

John Romita,
Romita

is

another

artist

whose career was permanently

his

affected by his association with Spider-Man. According

Comics Scene, he is "the artist most identified with

Spider-Man, with the possible exception of Steve Ditko.
Romita's style set the tone for every Spider-Man artist
to follow." The World Encyclopedia of Comics is even
more enthusiastic, saying, "Romita brought Spider-Man
.

in

titles

as

Kid Colt and Western

artist.

in

This was his

first

Marvel business

chance to depict
in the late fifties

Romita went to work for DC, producing mostly romance

material. By 1965 he was back at his alma mater again
and was swept up in the new wave of popularity for
superheroes. After inking The Avengers, pencilling
Daredevil, and working on Captain America once again,
Romita took over the Amazing Spider-Man book with
# 39 (September, 1966). He remained with the character, off and on, for the next seven years. He was, like
Kirby and Buscema, an influential artist, and he had a
great deal to do with the overall look of Marvel comics
in the seventies. In 1972 he was appointed art director

with the rest of Marvel's handsomely illustrated

Whereas Ditko's Spider-Man was populated by

everyday people, Romita's Spider-Man was populated
by noble-bearing and majestic-looking characters." Interestingly enough Romita had been drawing everyday
people himself, in such DC titles as Girls' Love Stories,
Secret Hearts, and Falling In Love, before taking over
Spidey.
He was bom in Brooklyn in 1930 and started drawing
soon after. "I used to
copy my favorite comic strips
like Dick Tracy and Terry and the Pirates. Later I went
on to do Disney characters. Before I was ten years old,
Terry, and Disney
I was doing drawings of all the Tracy,
characters. ... At that age, I didn't know if I wanted to
be a cartoonist or not. I remember sending a batch of my
samples to the New York News when I was about
eleven. They sent me a warm letter of encouragement.
They told me that Chester Gould had a contract with
them to do Tracy and therefore they couldn't really take
him off the strip to put me on it."
After attending Manhattan's High School of Industrial
Arts, he broke into comics in 1949 by doing romance
stories for magazines published by the Famous Funnies
folks. His long association with Marvel began the following year. In those early years Romita worked in just
about every category going in that period before the
superheroes came back crime, romance, horror, jungle, science fiction, etc. He's said, "In this business you
must be able to handle anything that comes your way.
The superheroes may be very big today. But it's quite
possible in a few years that there won't be any superhero
comic books. Instead it might be Westerns or a combination of soap opera and science fiction." Throughout the
1950s and into the 1960s he certainly demonstrated his
versatility. Besides the above genres, Romita also tried
.

such cowboy

a superhero.
During a slump

titles

at

And when Captain America made a brief comeback

1954, both in his own magazine and in Young Men,

Romita was the

in line

hand

Kid.

to

Sr.

for Marvel.

While

this

decreased his output,

it

increased

his influence.

The ever-growing popularity of the character

prompted the Register and Tribune Syndicate to introduce an Amazing Spider-Man strip in the middle 1970s.
Romita was the initial artist on the feature, which at its
peak was appearing in several hundred newspapers
across the country. Interviewed in Cartoonist PROfi/es in

1978, he was not wildly enthusiastic about the venture.

a problem to me to accept the format change,"
he complained, "from a twenty-pager to daily strips and
Sunday pages. The comic books give you a chance to use
a lot of tricky storytelling and graphic gimmicks.
You
don't have to begin and end a characterization in one
story
I miss the luxury of panoramic action shots and
"It's still

Not surprisingly, Romita quit the

before much more time had passed.
Now the art director at Marvel, he has returned to
Spidey on a few occasions, inking comic book pages
the full-page spreads."

strip

"I wish
had the time
do more with him," he's said. "If were willing to
think
could do steady
give up my nine-to-five job,
work with him. But I'm trying to avoid getting back

pencilled by his son John, Jr.

to

pages every
have the energy for that anymore."

into the rat race, turning out a lot of

week.

88

just don't

Romita's dramatic

px

1966

)f

Spicier

Man. Script by Stan Lee, inks by Mike Esposito.

Comics Group.)

Alex Schomburg
Schomburg's work exemplified the maxim that you can't
its cover, since his comic book covers
were often livelier and better drawn than anything to be
found inside the magazines they graced. He was inventive, untiring, and sometimes subtly whimsical. The master of controlled clutter, he was the Hieronymous Bosch
of comics and filled his drawings with dozens of figures,
weapons, infernal machines, and enough action for at

his covers made perfect packaging for the Marvel wartime titles.
Schomburg also turned out covers for Exciting Com-

and woolly pageantry, and

judge a book by

ics,

All New,

titles

as

and Green Hornet. The covers

most of the Harvey comics came with a two-page

called The Story Behind
The Cover and the writer who could fit the whole story
of a Schomburg cover into that limited space was indeed
a master of compression. During his decade and more
in the field he did very little interior work, the most
notable job being Jon Juan. This was a 1950 feature
starring a super lover, with script by Jerry Siegel, and it
lasted exactly one issue.
Schomburg never worked directly inside a publishing house. "I had my own small studio over on Eighth
Avenue and Forty-fourth Street," he once explained.
"In that manner was able to do work for the competiof

a year of ordinary covers.

His most memorable efforts were for Marvel in the
years just before and during the Second World War. In
his late thirties when he began producing covers,
Schomburg became an expert at depicting Captain
America, the Human Torch, and Sub-Mariner, singly or
as a team, in the most complex and improbable situations. His spectacular and intricate covers appeared on
Marvel Mystery Comics, Human Torch, Sub-Mariner, All

Young Allies.

There was usually no single center of attention on one

of his bright covers; they were more like three-ring circuses, with Sub-Mariner pulling down a bridge and causing Nazi troops and tanks to go plummeting into a ravine in one comer, the Human Torch saving Bucky from
being fed into a blast furnace in another, and Cap parachuting down and blasting away at a dozen or so hooded
Japanese spies with a tripod machine gun. You could
browse through a Schomburg cover, savoring the weapons and fiendish devices, the multiplicity of perils about

Ned

Pines's Standard Magazines, for

signed the art 'Xela.' " He usually had a free
hand. "I seldom submitted pencil roughs. They bought
sight unseen, just as long as the Japs showed their ugly
teeth and glasses and the Nazis looked like bums." An
average cover took a week to do and the usual pay
tion

such as

whom

was $40 each.

After leaving comics in the early 1950s, Schomburg devoted his time to working as an illustrator for hardcover
books and for science fiction magazines like Amazing
Stories and Isaac Asimov's. In recent years he's returned
to the complexity and clutter of yesteryear by doing
some very handsome paintings based on his Golden
Age covers. In them Captain America, the Human
Torch, and Sub-Mariner once again face unprece-

some hapless damsel, the

rendered Axis troops, the explosions
and fireworks. The artist, with his bravura style, always
convinced you that all the action and noise he crammed
into a cover could actually be occurring at that single
frozen instant of time. He was an expert at a sort of wild

to befall Toro, Bucky, or

hordes of

Black Terror, and such Harvey

printed explanation inside

least

Winners, and

Thrilling,

Speed Comics,

faithfully

dented, and lovingly rendered, perils and perplexities.

90

Yet another impressively cluttered wartime cover. (Copyright

and Mawel Comics Group.)

1943 Daring Comics,

Inc.

John Severin
worked for several other publishers, including Marvel
and DC. His specialties remained cowboys and soldiers:

Throughout his career, which started in 1947, Severin

has had very little to do with superheroes. A dedicated
realist, he's at his

earth adventure.

when dealing with more down-toThe Old West and the battlefields of

Sgt. Rock,

best

the Kid,

"Stan Lee and

was 'Moo!' "), the Lazo Kid, and American Eagle, who
became the cover-featured star of the magazine. On the
Indian strip particularly, Severin worked hard to get
the look and feel of the period. He also got involved in
the writing. "The later American Eagle," he's explained,
"when it started to get a little authenticity in the story
line, when you got a feeling of realism in the story and
when it wasn't just tomahawks and cavalry sabers, it was
I

list

of markets.

They did fantasy and science fiction including some

adaptions of Ray Bradbury stories for Weird Fantasy
and war tales for Frontline Combat. Severin has suggested that he and Elder teamed up originally "because
we both supplied what the other guy needed. He
couldn't draw and couldn't ink." Severin was less than

serious about this appraisal of their respective talents

and eventually both of them went out on their own. It

was for Two-Fisted Tales that Severin began inking his
own pages. His inking style, harsher than Elder's, was
choppy, giving the impression he was engraving his
drawings on the page. This provided a bolder look that
fit

in

with the tone of the magazine, with the grim For-

yams and the low-key and gritty Western

Severin was allowed to edit several issues of

Two-Fisted,

and he drew every

single story in

#s

EC

in

the middle

fifties,

who

did I think had the most

the comics field. And I
said, 'Me.' Because I don't think that anybody
else in the field is crazy enough to do it that way."
his questions was,

outstanding technique

37, 38,

and 39.
After the demise of

Billy

Severin

Savage Tales.
In an interview some years ago Severin said, "Not
too long ago somebody asked me for an interview
and said, 'Send me some questions.' And one of

eign Legion
stories.

this last character

Manhattan's High School of Music and Art. He lists Roy

Crane's Captain Easy as one of his major influences.
"He could do anything," Severin's said of Crane. "Roy
Crane did adventure with a beautiful combination of
cartooning and storytelling." Severin's first professional
work was done for the Prize group, chiefly for Prize
Comics Western. For that title he drew, usually with Bill
Elder inking, the Black Bull ("The Black Bull's war cry

On

started off pencilling

Appropriately enough some of his

most characteristic work appeared in Two-Fisted Tales.
He was bom in New Jersey in 1921 and studied at
style.

about then that began taking a hand."

In 1951 he and Elder added EC to their

Sgt. Fury.

and inking, but as he explains,

got together and he said, 'How would
you like to take this book?' It was Sgt. Fury and I said,
'Swell.' And after three or issues he said,
forget what,
it was some reason like, 'Gee, Severin, you're rotten.' So
then Dick Ayres pencilled and I inked."
In 1958 he began a long and continuing association
with Cracked, one of the more successful black-andwhite Mad imitators. Severin, who'd also worked for
Mad itself, did interior stuff and a great many full-color
covers, drawing in a lighter version of his basic style.
From the 1960s on he provided ambitious black-andwhite stories for the Warren titles Eerie, Creepy, and
the short-lived Blazing Combat. He once said his favorite material was that drawn for EC, Cracked, and Warren. "And the main reason for that is simply that you
have the most free expression with them."
Severin teamed with his sister Marie in the early 1970s
to draw Marvel's Conan spin-off Kull the Conqueror.
This barbarian, even with eight of his fifteen issues produced by the Severins, didn't thrive. When adventure of
a wild and woolly sort has tried for a comeback, Severin
has usually been there. He contributed to the unsuccessful Atlas black-and-white Thrilling Adventure Stories in
1975. And he showed up when Marvel launched its
full-color Amazing High Adventure in 1985. Editor Carl
Potts spoke of him reverentially in his introductory remarks, saying, "For decades John Severin has been one
of the best and most respected comics artists in the
business. ... I'm happy to present his work here, with
a job John has jam-packed with authentic detail." More
recently he has done work for Marvel's newly revived

various wars have been the favorite subjects for his

macho drawing

Kid Colt, the Ringo Kid, Combat Casey,

and

Severin

92

in

OP
.

WHAT'S ONE
THE/V\

SCALPS) ' >,'9/+z3a\

SS' '''3vdS&R\

WORTH?

Ir

^>_.

aj^^^PV' v >ftgJ2!^

"*

iM2aHi^

^^Wjt^S-'XS-Ji^

MEXICO.

E o^

^^^^^^1

^IBfty^

-J

l^""^^^[l/^
B^ LORDY. ^g"
"1-.
'11 AN OLD
TT Jy^^Q^

'

WO/ViAN.fl

^?^^^K

^^B*?8W^jlf-^5 _^^r

13^ ~i*
LjB

""V^-

-*r

^^^t>^*^^<^/
\

P^^*"

~---;

r^\
^^*--^'^

****^^
!--

^*

Eg

r -

fc-

^~^

>t

y*

ss& W^TTi
S
^[t ^ ^ \ t-,
>? jgs
fl^B^,

*^^^^^W1

*&ff

' ^*

^s^// ^*itf^
^ \ ^^ej^l
mXV-f^S

^^Z^*^Wfj9
S^>^m
sHi'f '* ^^?*iS>
MM

'.'

Vf*.,V
r

PRETTY
^-g
HANDY WITH (3
THAT BELLY jTi
GUN. _^^|

\^H

m^M
^fe^S^I
_^^MF *
Su"^

Western action and human drama. Severin

1985 Marvel Comics Group.)

style.

Script by Charles Dixon. (Copyright

"

Joe Shuster
Superman

along with Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Drac-

panels to a page: four panels or three panels, and

six

a character compelling enough to thrive

without any help from his original creators. And like
Clark Kent, Joe Shuster has always been overshadowed
by Superman. Shuster is well-known and much written
about simply because he is the cocreator of the most
successful comic book character of all time. Yet his actual work, his drawing style, is usually either ignored or
dismissed. Appraising Shuster's art has proven difficult
ula, etc.

sometimes two panels.

is

who have tried, because once Superman became popular a shop was set up to meet the accelerating
demand for material. Shuster signed his name to everything coming out of the shop, including work done by
Paul Cassidy, Leo Novack, John Sikela, and Wayne Borfor those

and

think

one day we

stories.

appreciate Shuster's accomplish-

ways and was one of the

interesting

artists

ing.

To understand and

just

had one

panel to a page. The kids loved it because it was spectacular. I could do so much more. Later on, the editors
stopped us from doing that. They said the kids were not
getting their money's worth."
What Shuster is talking about here, in his self-effacing
way, is how he changed the format of comic books.
Almost all his contemporaries in those early days were
striving to look like newspaper strips and Sunday pages.
Shuster was among the first to realize that a comic book
page is not a newspaper page. He broke his up in new
first

comic book

to use a full-page splash panel to lead off his

These panels were often more

ing the story to

come

like posters, tout-

rather than offering the opening

ments as a cartoonist and the innovations he brought to

book business, you have to go back
to the middle 1930s, to the years before the Man of Steel
had leaped over a single skycraper or raced against his
first locomotive, when Shuster and his long-time friend
Jerry Siegel were breaking into comics.
Siegel and Shuster began selling to comic books when
there were only a few titles being published. In fact, they
initially called
sold two features to More Fun Comics

The newspaper artist who seems to have had the

most influence on Shuster was Roy Crane, who was also
breaking away from traditional layouts in his Captain
Easy Sunday pages. Shuster's appealing, concise style,
with its cartoony overtones, is a personal variation on

1935, the pioneering magazine's first year

in business. This book, put together by the enterprising
and usually impecunious Major Malcolm WheelerNicholson, was the first, with a couple of unsuccessful
earlier exceptions, to use original material. Up until the
Major came along comic books had been content to

shot, the close-up. In

scene.

the fledgling comic

newspaper

Another important influence on Shuster was the movHe's said he was inspired by them "as far as the
composition of different scenes. You know, the long
ies.

New Fun in

reprint

Crane's.

strips.

The

earliest

work

my mind's eye was creating a

movie and playing all the parts. would become an actor
and the director as well."
For the most part Shuster was self-taught. "I had very
little formal training.
think it was natural talent. I began
drawing when was about four years old, I've been told.
I

of the Cleve-

some school

did take

courses

in

drawing, illustration

and anatomy." As he recalls the early comic book features weren't drawn under ideal conditions. "I had no
drawing board at the time, no art supplies. My mother
gave me her bread board to work on when she wasn't
using it.
When had no paper, sometimes would
remember once found
use brown wrapping paper.
several rolls of wallpaper. was overjoyed. The back was
white and had enough drawing paper to supply me for
a long time." Recalling Henri Duval and Dr. Occult,
Shuster says, "One was done on brown paper and one
on wallpaper. When it was sold, they told us to redraw
it and we went out and bought good paper."
In 1938 he and Siegel succeeded in selling Superman
to Action Comics and that changed Shuster's life for
good and all.
But that's another story.

land-based artist-and-writer team seems to be unsold

Sunday page ideas. The features were Henri Duval,
about a swashbuckling French swordsman, and Dr. Occult starring a ghost detective.

Although they couldn't sell Superman, a character

cooked up while still in high school, the team did
place several other features with Major Nicholson: Federal Men in New Comics, Radio Squad in More Fun,
and Spy and Slam Bradley in Detective. Siegel has said,
'Slam Bradley was a dry run for Superman ... we just
couldn't resist putting into Slam Bradley some of the
slam-bang stuff which we knew would be in Superman.
Shuster adds, "We turned it out with no restrictions,
complete freedom to do what we wanted. The only problem was we had a deadline. We had to work very fast,
so Jerry suggested that we save time by putting less than

they'd

94

Dr. Mystic

appeared exactly once,

Company.

Inc.)

in

Funny Pages. (Copyright

1936 Comics Magazine

Bill

Sienkiewicz

Sienkiewicz has learned on the job. In a half-dozen years

in comic books he's moved from being a sedulous imita-

an artist with a highly individual

own. He's also become a very forceful painter
covers provide attractive packaging for many

style all his

his

Marvel

titles

and

for

DCs

line of science fiction

graphic

Comics Buyer's Guide poll he placed

third on the list of favorite artists, and the book he'd been
devoting most of his time to, The New Mutants, was
among the top ten on the favorite comic list.
Only a few years ago Sienkiewicz was not as highly
thought of. Back in 1982, for example, The Comics
Journal dismissed him as someone whose "art leans
heavily on lessons learned from Neal Adams." They concluded that "Sienkiewicz seems to have learned to draw
by studying Adams, period." Sienkiewicz acknowledges
novels. In a recent

Adams influence, saying in a recent interview,

"While

Neal's stuff used to have such an incredible effect

on me,

the

all

if nothing else, would be a chance to play with design

and pattern and motifs. ... just started to add lighting, shadows, and stuff. All of a sudden
found myself
being interested in certain characters and it just became
I

own amusement and

he studied

illustration

that

characters in this incredibly chiaroscuro kind of world,

strictly for his

that

Moon Knight

high school,

credits the

There followed a period where he did mostly covers.

he explains. "I felt like
my black-and-white work was getting up to a certain
level and my painting was way down here." Eventually
Sienkiewicz settled in for a run with The New Mutants.
He did the interior work both pencilling and inking
and painted the covers. His layouts became increasingly audacious and he threw in every sort of technique
from Craftint to spatter. The artwork showed the influence of a wide range of artists, including Bob Peak,
Ralph Steadman, and Gustav Klimt. He's admitted that
initially he wasn't enthusiastic about the assignment,
but then he got to thinking "maybe these bland-looking

in

He
less

"I'd gotten the painting bug,"

that of his friends. In college

own."

some

the book.

while

its

were patently me." It was

he started experimenting with covers: trying unconventional layouts, working
entirely in black and white. With the thirtieth issue he left

on things

start relying

while drawing

really doesn't

had a look of

really

these feelings of frustration and a desire to cut loose

and

anymore."
He's been a comics fan since early childhood. "I guess
was about six years old," he recalls. "I started reading
may even
comics just about the time started to draw
have started drawing them before started reading them.
... pretty much started just from being bored, basically.
guess that's how every kid starts." His favorite artists
in his youth were Jack Kirby and Curt Swan. "And oddly
enough, when Neal first came on the scene, couldn't
stomach his stuff
It wasn't until later, when he started
doing interior stuff, that started to catch on. It was an
acquired taste." Sienkiewicz drew comic book pages
it

it

than flattering, with pushing him on to work out a style, a way of

telling stories, that was his alone. "It bugged me," he
says. "It started to brew and finally came to some kind
of a head around Moon Knight # 23, when there were

tor of others to being

and

felt

frequent comparisons to Adams,

fun to do."
In addition to comics, Sienkiewicz has drawn for the
National Lampoon and magazines like Golf Digest. In
1985 he gave up The New Mutants to devote himself
to special projects and graphic novels for Marvel.
Asked to explain how he approached his work, he
replied, "I'm trying to say, look, this is life, this is
fun ... I think that's pretty much what my work is an
expression of
it's so much fun."

and

advertising.

His first regular assignment in comics came in 1980,

when he was signed by Marvel to draw Moon Knight. He

and showing his

which contained mostly drawings of DC characters. "It started out looking a lot like Neal's stuff," he
says, "and it took almost fifteen to twenty issues before

says he got the job by simply walking in

portfolio,

96

The New Mutants enter Sienkewicz's bizarre dreamworld.

(Copyright 1985 Marvel Comics Group.)

Script by Chris Claremont.

Walt Simonson
It

wasn't until

Simonson had been

years that he produced a "hot

when he became

1983,

artist

and

a variety of features Master of Kung Fu, Battlestar

Galactica, The Hulk, Star Wars, and Dazzler. He even
put in some time pencilling Thor in 1977 and 1978. He

comics for ten

That occurred in

in

title."

on Marvel's

writer

was enthusiastic about returning to the helmeted hero in

1983. "Of all the Marvel superheroes, Thor was the guy
that
read first and he remained my favorite during

Thor. He'd been associated with successful characters

before

Batman, Fantastic Four,

etc.

but

his contribu-

When Thor
# 337 (November, 1983) hit the stands, however, things
were different and the magazine sold out in shops across
the country. Even Simonson's admirers hadn't expected
that and The Comics Journal's headline
"Simonson
Thor Success Surprises Dealers" was typical of the
reaction in the fan press. The work that brought him a
larger audience was impressive, but somewhat more
subdued than what he'd done earlier. Simonson himself
tions hadn't boosted their sales appreciably.

Marvel's period of producing

sixties," he's said. In fact, in

Simonson became

on Battlestar Galactica. "I

had reached the point where
just didn't feel
was
putting in as much energy as I wanted to," he recalls.
"The writing provided a whole new set of problems of
tying writing and drawing together in a way that is really
very rarely possible when you have a different writer and
an artist." As to how he got the scripting job, "We had
people coming in and out of Galactica all the time. They
finally asked me if
wanted to write it and my wife
nudged me into it." His wife, Louise Simonson, was
editing the magazine at the time.
When it comes to the actual drawing, what's most
important to Simonson is that "the finished product has
I

characters or the visual vocabulary."

Bom

Simonson had two

drawing and geology. When he graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1968, he decided that art was more important to him than paleontology and moved on to the
Rhode Island School of Design.
His earliest professional artwork had been done for
Knoxville, Tennessee,

in

DC

in

the early 1970s, mostly fantasy stories for astitles.

In the

editor-writer Archie

as much energy as possible." He has devised his own

system of working. I do my pages by doing small drawings on typewriter-size paper," he says. "That's where
do my thumbnail sketches. ... I break the entire job
down, panel by panel, page by page, one page of typing paper per page of art in the book and then
put
these in the Artograph and project them to blow them
up to full size. ... I will draw them as I'm tracing them.
That way I'm able to keep the drawings as loose as
possible as long as possible, to try to get as much energy
as I can in the drawing of the finished product. Usually
actually
script the story from the thumbnail before
Everything that I do is really geared to
blow it up.
keeping the work as fluid as possible as long as can."
I

DC or the Marvel bullpen styles of the peHis people, even his improbably costumed hero,
were lean and elongated. His inking was intricate and
quirky, with a nervous, scratchy quality. And he experimented with page breakdowns, slicing up some into as
many as thirteen panels, devoting others to just one
enormous panel. He was obviously enjoying himself
and thinking, perhaps just a bit too much, about how
either the

riod.

best to

tell

Moving

he worked on

the story.

to Marvel in the middle 1970s,

autumn of 1973 he teamed up with

Goodwin to do an updated version
of the venerable crimefighter Manhunter
"He stalks
the world's most dangerous game!" The strip ran in
Detective Comics from # 437 through # 443. Simonson's pages had a highly individual look, owing little to
sorted

seriously interested in writing as

well as drawing while working

doing a very conservative comic. It's a lot like

used to be, for me, and haven't changed a lot of the

says, "I'm

abiding interests from childhood on

great comics in the

asm was such that Simonson, not yet a comics pro,

wrote and drew a Thor yam for his own amusement.
"What I'm doing now is working out my fantasies from
fifteen years ago. I put together a whole story at the time
and I am now doing that story, in altered form."

it

some

the late 1960s his enthusi-

98

An

apocalyptic battle from Simonson's Thor. (Copyright

1983 Marvel Comics Group.)

John Stanley
Another of the mystery men of comics, Stanley worked
anonymously during his decades as an artist and writer.

gag cartoons in the Saturday Evening Post. The red-clad

little tyke branched out in the 1940s, showing up in
newspaper advertising strips for Kleenex and in animated cartoons. Stanley believes he got the job of adapting the character to comic books by chance. "Oscar
handed me the assignment but I'm sure it was due to no
special form of brilliance that he thought I'd lend to it."
he's said. "It could have been handed it to Dan Noonan,
Kelly, or anyone else.
just happened to be available at

after the majority of his stuff was done

became known, and even then it was
only to dedicated fans who'd grown up with his Little
Lulu comic books. In recent years he's gained somewhat
more recognition, with the 1981 Smithsonian Book of
Comic-Book Comics reprinting over forty pages of his
work and more recently Another Rainbow announcing
It

was only years

that his identity

an ambitious reprint project.

Although Stanley is a cartoonist, it's as a writer and
idea man that he's most admired. What Stanley provided, after writing and drawing the first couple of issues
of Little Lulu (which commenced in 1945), was what
amounted to rough storyboards for others to work from.
Historian Mike Barrier explains the process this way.
"To say that Stanley 'wrote' Little Lulu is actually a little
deceptive, since he was responsible for more than the
plots and dialogue. He sketched each story in rough
form, so that he controlled the staging within each panel
and the appearance and attitudes of the characters. The
finished drawings were made by other cartoonists."
Stanley was

bom in New York in

New York School

scholarship to the
to

Don

tions.

Phelps, long-time

Stanley

"felt

manager

1914.

He won

the time."

Stanley remained available until the early 1960s, masterminding something like 175 issues of the magazine

(whose

of comics conven-

were well-to-do and being a city kid, he

in." From art school he went into
animation at the Manhattan-based Fleischer studios.
After that he contributed to The Mickey Mouse Magazine.

Stanley joined editor Oscar Lebeck in the Dell-West-

1940s. Lebeck was also

somewhat

childlike drawing style influenced Stanley. Stanley's

other coworkers included Dan Noonan, Dan Gromley.
and Walt Kelly. "Most of the artists were mainly con-

cerned with their

jealousies going

"but

when

own stuff and there were some

on here and there." Stanley has

petty

would stop what

they were doing to read it. Everyone knew he was something speical. ...
must admit that Walt and painted
the town many times. He was a very enjoyable guy to be
Little

Lulu character was created

in
in

some
titles,

about kids Nancy, Choo Choo Charlie.

O. G. Whiz. For a few issues of Raggedy Ann and
Andy he wrote and drew Peterkin Pottle, a feature
about a pint-size Walter Mitty. He left comics in the

much

with."

The

only the Stanley nudge to work its way out."

Stanley did a good deal of other writing, and
drawing, for an assortment of Dell-Western

said,

stack of art under his arm, everyone

1930s by Marge Henderson Buell and ran

the other char-

because of its mirrorlike quality and which unlocked

something in the adult reader's subconscious that perhaps had been resting there since childhood, needing

Kelly walked into the Western office with a

all

outsmarted the boys, instead of triumphing through

sheer brass as she had in the past. Many of the stories
built around the rivalry theme are ingenious and funny,
and the best of them spiral upward until the boys become the victims of a comic catastrophe."
It was these stories, drawn in variations of Stanley's
simple style, that won kid readers and kept some of them
fans for the rest of their lives. "What stories!" comments
Phelps. "It is amazing how good the stories remained
throughout the years given the limited framework that
Stanley had to work with. The stories all took place
within the same neighborhood confines ... so how did
they retain their freshness? A big reason is that they
captured beautifully the mannerisms and slang of neighborhood kids.
There wasn't an issue that came out
which did not contain some gesture, word inflection, or
mannerism that amused and amazed the child reader

of Art. According

possible that his simple,

was Marges Little Lulu). He

Tubby from the original gag

and small. And, as Barrier points out, he

changed Lulu from the lovable brat of the Post days.
Eventually "Lulu herself became a 'good little girl' who

did not really blend

it's

official title

acters, large

his classmates

a writer-artist and

and

cartoons, but Stanley invented almost

very uncomfortable there as most of

em New York office in the early

full

inherited Lulu's boyfriend

the middle

late

a series of

of

it

1960s, apparently with no regrets and some

He's evidenced no desire to return.

bitterness.

100

3^~

wordless sample of Stanley's

art.

(Copyright

1986 Western Publishing Co.)

James Steranko
Although his career in mainstream comic books lasted
only a few years, Steranko managed to make a lasting

style,

work on the adventures of the belligerent, one-eyed Nick Fury in the late 1960s won him considerable attention and fan awards at the time. It also
established a precedent for much of the innovative and
experimental work done by other artists since.

posters. His splash panels

impression. His

tive

in Pennsylvania in 1938, Steranko led a varied

before breaking into comics in 1966. He'd been a

and

carnival pitchman, escape artist, magician, guitar player,

photographer, and advertising director. "I do not consider myself an artist," he's said. "When I think about
people who are really artists, I think of Reed Crandall
and Neal Adams and maybe a half-dozen other people
in comics who draw amazingly well. If I had to categorize
myself, I would probably say that I belong in the class of

than

seething with righteous fury and romantic de-

The

story excites, pulls, twists,

and

bites."

Encyclopedia of Comics called Nick

Fury "possibly the best written and drawn strip of the

decade." Not everyone, of course, was completely smitten. Looking back in the pages of The Comics Journal
in 1979, Gary Groth opined, "Steranko's only real contribution to

comics

is

in raising the technical level of

medium to that of a James Bond movie." But even that

was no mean accomplishment.
By 1969 he had ceased doing comic book pages for
Marvel, supposedly because of deadline problems. In the
early 1970s he drew covers for such titles as Doc Savage
and Fantastic Four. He also edited FOOM, a short-lived
magazine Marvel issued for its fans. When he abandoned Nick Fury, he started his own publishing outfit
and named it Supergraphics. The company published
two well-researched volumes of Steranko's yet-to-be
completed history of comic books and continues to publish Prevue
which began life as Comixscene and then
turned into Mediascene. Steranko has done a variety of
art jobs over the years, including posters, book jackets,
paperback covers, the graphic novel Chandler, and illus-

trations for his

everything

own

magazine.

When

asked some years

ago to give advice to young artists, he replied by quoting

what a commercial artist had once told him. "He said,
'Make sure that your work is so goddamn good that
when you go to a company, they can't afford not to hire
"
you. They can't afford to let the competition get you!'

goes into every comic

story," he once explained. "Nick Fury became Steranko." Steranko used a whole bag of tricks to catch
the reader's attention and, more often than not, he
held it throughout the story. He mixed the Marvel
played

life,

And The World

It was the superhero boom of the middle sixties that

got Steranko into comics. In 1966, while still working as
an advertising art director, he sold a batch of brand new
characters to Harvey. He designed the heroes and wrote
the scripts, but didn't do any of the drawing. Spyman
made it through three issues and his other creations
didn't fare any better. By the end of the year he was in
the Marvel fold, inking Jack Kirby's Nick Fury, Agent of
SHIELD. A few issues later he took over the writing
and drawing of the crusty superspy's escapades. Fans
and readers were impressed, and by the spring of 1968,
Nick had a magazine of his own.
An artist with wide-ranging and eclectic interests,
Steranko created a personal and compelling collage to
use on Nick Fury. "Everything from films, from radio,
pulps, business, everything I could possibly apply from
my background, including the magic I've done, the

I've

Krigstein,

yet cuttingly real setting appear characters bigger

termination.

storyteller."

gigs

and added the flash of op art

were sometimes as imaginaas those gracing The Spirit. He was continually
and

experimenting with time, like Krigstein before him,

cutting a tier into six or eight panels to speed up or
slow down an action.
Steranko's work drew forth a great many enthusiastic
responses. The late Phil Seuling said, "In a psychedelic

Bom
life

as then personified by Kirby, with the techniques

of Eisner

102

J^
dsm

r^^^j
<wWnL\ m
tMl/% j|

CI SI
\^l#)^ fclW*'

<53v^

MLj0J

%^Jra

B^^SI

fc
made comics
1967 Marvel Comics Group.)

Steranko's innovative layouts

history. Inks

by Frank Giacoia. (Copyright

,,,..' 1

|H

Frank
He began

his professional

life

Thome
Boris Karloff, and Mighty Samson.
up with DC in 1968 Thome had
a fully developed style of his own. He put it to good use,
even though he was usually assigned the second-string
characters. His work on Tomahawk, Korak, and Enemy

as a disciple of Alex Ray-

ries in Twilight Zone,

mond, whom he imitated pretty well. This led to

Thome's drawing the Perry Mason newspaper strip in
1952, when he was just twenty-two. "Alex Raymond was
my idol in my teen years and early twenties," he recalled

much

later.

tures, but

"Working

move away from

the

struggled for several years to

Raymond

With the help,

look.

guidance, cajoling, and philosophizing of the great children's book illustrator Harry Devlin, I broke the Ray-

mond

my own

Sonja.

still

trying to find

style."

comic books.

Thome
was bom

lives in

the area of

New

Jersey where he

1930. He's married to his high school

marked "with

sweetheart. He's said his early years were

feeling that drives

an uninterrupted passion to perform before the masses

as a magician and musician." An equal interest in
drawing persuaded him to enter Art Career School in
New York City. While still in school he managed to do
some pulp illustrating and a little comic book work. He
next sold a daily strip, with the snappy title of The Illustrated History of Union County, to a New Jersey newspaper. "I wrote as well as drew the series. It paid 25
bucks a piece 150 smackers a week. A king's ransom.

and then a
Although his
style was changing, he was still in the Raymond camp.
And among his early assignments were comic book versions of Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim. In 1956 he took
over the soap opera strip, Dr. Guy Bennett. "It's a mankilling job doing a daily and a Sunday single-handed,"
strip

fifteen-year association with Dell-Western.

he's said of his six years with the

good

young." During his time with the

doctor, "but

love her,

among them Wendy Pini of Elfquest fame he

staged magic shows. The boy magician from New Jersey
had become the old wizard of lost and ancient times.
Since parting company with the warrior maiden.
Thome has left conventional comics. He draws prettygirl strips for National Lampoon and Playboy. He is
presently busy with a barbarian of his own creation:
Ghita of Alizarr, who's thus far appeared in two blackand-white graphic novels. Tougher, and homier, than
Sonja, her impressively drawn adventures are for mature
Sonja

was

Thome

broke
began to draw in a
strip

to carry her standard.

His fondness for the she-devil caused Thome to turn

out some of his most ambitious and detailed artwork
while in her service. His ancient cities, his crowded bazaars, his wizards and warriors were all done on a scale
that would've made Cecil B. De Mille envious. Thome
developed new layouts, new ways of breaking down his
pages. And his Sonja was depicted in a way that was
sensuous and knowing. At the height of his involvement
with the character Thome began appearing at comics
conventions around the country in the guise of the Wizard. The long beard and Willie Nelson hair he'd acquired
helped the illusion. With various young women as Red

got married."

Next came the Erie Stanley Gardner

me

deeply; that should be enough."

We

Red

to

character taken from Robert E. Howard's

still

in

place in

Conan saga and developed into a property by Roy

Thomas, Red Sonja was billed by Marvel as a "She-devil
With A Sword." This red-haired barbarian lady had a
profound effect on Thome and in the midst of drawing
her comic book adventures he said, "Red Sonja is as real
to me as you who hold this book in your hands.
Call
it midlife crisis. Call it Faustian. Say what you will about
my madness for Sonja. There is a strange, deep inner

The
search for a style of his own was, despite Thome's
demurrers, a successful one, and by the 1970s he was
doing some of the most original and distinctive work in
habit. I'm

the time he joined

Ace was impressive.

The major confrontation in Thome's life took
the middle 1970s, when he was introduced

Alex's style pleased King Fea-

in

bothered me.

By

away from the Raymond look. He

more realistic way, experimented with cinematic layouts,
and took more chances.
The new style was in evidence in his comic book work
as well, especially in the fantasy and science fiction sto

audiences only.

104

I SIMP1_V
THE JEWEL WDULC? A/OT
WISHEP TO
HAVE VANlSHECX CHILCnot evEr*...\F you HAP PCO\/E TO
you I HAVE
FIPST PEUVEr?EE? ME
THE "1JBAW3
THE r*/Z T 5EEK

Copyright

1976

by Marvel Comics Group.

Red Sonja journeys through a busy Thorne landscape.

All

nghu

raiarvad

Alex Toth
One

of the real mavericks of comics, Toth has been in

the business for forty years

and has

subtlety, light
tive

His next job won't be exactly like the last one, and
you can be certain he won't be drawing next year the way
he was last year. He considers himself to be still learning
and believes that the most important ability an artist can
develop is "the ability to tell the story." Toth's restlessness, his need to push into new areas and try new ways
of telling his stories, coupled with his willingness to
speak up for his views, have kept him from settling into
a comfortable niche. This has meant that the majority of
comics fans, who tend to favor year-in-year-out consistency in their cartoonists, have been more perplexed than
enthusiastic about his work. In the introduction to a Toth
interview published in Graphic Story Magazine in 1970,
Gil Kane implied that Toth
"one of the finest artists
comics ever produced" was not for the average reader
rut.

and

source and drop shadow mechanics, nega-

and the overlapping of same, tension." Toth's stuff in this period is

very good, but he still looks like a gifted disciple of the

yet to settle into a

positive silhouette values, shapes

Caniff school.

He

hadn't yet assimilated

all

that Sickles

had to teach. His work stood out, though, and he was

soon a star at DC.
Toth moved around a good deal in the 1950s,
changing his

He

several times.

style

likes

to

quote

some advice Roy Crane once gave him "Don't draw

too much into each panel. Throw out everything you
don't need to tell the story!" He did some exceptional
work for an issue of Crime and Punishment, using
doubletone paper to get his depth effects. He drew romance comics for several publishers, developing a
fresh, cinematic approach that other artists went on
imitating for years. He ghosted the Casey Ruggles
newspaper strip, spent some time in the service, and
then settled in Southern California. From the middle
1950s into the 1960s he did most of his comic book

and was basically an artist's artist. Fifteen years later The

Comics Journal reprinted the interview under the title
Still The "Artist's Artist. " This may be the tag that'll stick
to Toth for the rest of his career.
Alexander Toth was bom in New York City in 1928.
An only child, he found himself with a lot of time to fill.
"I began to doodle at age three, but couldn't sell a thing
until
was fifteen." He attended the High School of
Industrial Arts, where he rubbed shoulders with other
would-be cartoonists. While still in high school he started
getting assignments from Steve Douglas at Famous Funnies, Inc. This consisted of two- and three-page stories
and spot illustrations for text fillers in Heroic Comics. In
1947, after "pestering" him for several years, Toth was
hired by Sheldon Mayer to work for the All-American
division of DC. "He was terrific," Toth has said of his
editor. "Warm, wildly funny, unpredictable from moment to moment, and with a great flair for dramatic
impact and zany antics."
The superheroes were still thriving in those early postwar years. Toth illustrated the adventures of quite a few
of them, including Green Lantern, Dr. Mid-nite, and the
Atom. By this time he'd fallen under the spell of the
newspaper strip work of Milton Caniff, Frank Robbins,
and Noel Sickles, his lifelong idol. "What gained from
Noel," he's said, "was an appreciation for economy, clarity, line, mass, pattern, perspective, dramatic moment,

work

for Dell-Western. Toth's specialty was comic book

adaptations of movies and television shows Zorro, 77
Sunset Strip, Rio Bravo, Sea Hunt, The FBI Story, The

Real McCoys, etc. He was constantly experimenting,

even with the basic tools he used. He was one of the
first in comics to use a Rapidograph pen and the now

fairly

common

markers.

Living in Southern California, Toth

ested in animation.

He

1964 and has been

in

did his

first

and out of

man

became

work
it

in

inter-

the field in

ever since, mostly

Hanna-Barbcomic books now and then. He

did some excellent artwork for the Warren black-andwhites. His major job there was Bravo For Adventure
in The Rook, which allowed him to indulge his fondness for the 1930s, airplanes, and the movies. It's no
as a character design
era.

He

still

works

for outfits like

in

coincidence that Jesse Bravo, the daredevil stunt flyer,

looks an awful lot like Enrol Flynn. Toth has also

worked

for

European

pedo 1936. Toward

publishers,

on

features like Tor-

1970 interview he
have done a lot more with it

the end of that

admitted, "I expected to

than I have. I am my biggest disappointment." It's that
disappointment, of course, that keeps him going and
keeps him always several lengths ahead of the pack.

106

YOU'RE ROLLING IN/ YOUR MISSION IS FINISHED AND

YOU'RE ROLLING IN/ YOU STREAK ACROSS THE
FIELD AT IOOO FEET IN RIGHT ECHELON/ THEN...

THEN YOU GRACEFULL/ PEEL OFF... BRAKE, FLAPS AND

TRICYCLE LANDING GEAR DOWN, AND YOUR SKJMMlNG

YOU HAVE LANDED/ YOU NOW TAXI YOUR JET POWN

TO THE GROUP OF WAITING CREWMEN/ NEWS OF
YOUR VICTORY HAS ALREADY REACHED THEM '

YOU SHOVE BACK THE CANOPX JERK OFF THE

CLUMSY HELMET AND YOU CLIMB TO THE GROUND TO

MACHINE TOUCHES GROUND AGAIN/

INSPECT

DAMAGE THE MIGS HAVE PONE TO YOUR STURDY PLANE!

m*^^^-^^J
tx

b&L

J^lTl^T^^3^|

(M

ANP THEN >OU THINK HOW THE MIGS ANP >OU THINK OF THAT CLASSROOM
ANP AS YOU FINGER THE TORN
ALUMINUM, yOU THINK OF THE 20 tMA GO FASTER THAN YOU, ANP YOU THINK IN THE SKY/ ANP THEN YOU THINK... WE'D
HOW THE MIGS OUTNUMBER yOU... BETTER DO SOMETHING, SOON...
CANNON THE MIGS HAVE '

...PRETTY

forceful

artists like

GOLPARNEP SOON/

and cinematic page, putting to use everything he'd learned from the work of
1986 William M. Gaines.)
Noel Sickles. (Copyright

George Tuska
A veteran of nearly a half-century in comic books, Tuska

more

realistic, partly because he was hired to work on

Crime Does Not Pay. There he illustrated more or less
true stories that were packed with hoodlums, killers, gun
molls, fast cars, and tommy-guns. He soon took over the
lead-off yam, the one narrated by Mr. Crime, who was
a cross between radio's sardonic Whistler and Mr.
Coffee Nerves from the Postum newspaper comic section ads. A good deal of violence and bloodshed showed
up in the comic books in the immediate postwar years,
and this Crime Does Not Pay stuff shows Tuska in his
most gritty and hard-boiled phase.
During these same years he did a great deal of drawing for books such as Exciting and Thrilling, working on
surviving superheroes like the Black Terror and the orig-

has worked for just about every major publisher and

quite a few minor ones. He's drawn superheroes, cowboys, jungle girls, gangbusters, clowns, and magicians. In
his spare time he's turned out the newspaper strip adventures of Scorchy Smith, Buck Rogers, and Super-

man.
Tuska started out in the shops, working first for Eisner-Iger and then for Chesler. His earliest published
work showed up in Mystery Men Comics, Speed Comics, and Wonderworld Comics. Already Tuska was developing, in the features he drew for these magazines,
two of his lifelong graphic specialties pretty women
and boats. He branched out considerably in the early
1940s. For Fawcett he produced the second and third
issues of the newly launched Captain Mawel Adventures, and also did Golden Arrow in Whiz and El Carim
in Master. The latter fellow was but one of the several
magicians he worked on at the time; Zanzibar and Hale
the Magician were others.
At Quality he depicted several characters, most nota-

bly Uncle

Sam

in that superpatriot's

own

inal

crime

for Marvel's earliest

style at this

and cartoon elements.

cially effective

It

comedy

ways a good figure

man and

the 1950s,

titles.

The

rebirth of the

superhero genre

in

the

to his serving time with the Avengers,

artists as Noel Sickles, Bert Christman, and

Frank Robbins. Tuska graduated from Scorchy to the
best-known science fiction hero in the world. He drew
Buck Rogers until its demise in 1967.
Over the years his work has become less vital, less
interesting. A very prolific penciller, he has been too

exceptional

uncluttered, espeal-

were strong. By
work had become much

often at the mercy of inkers less talented than he.

his layouts

the middle of the 1940s, his

in

Superman movies.
The super-gang strip was Tuska's third newspaper
venture. From 1954 to 1959 he both drew and wrote
Scorchy Smith for the Associated Press. This was the
aviation strip begun in 1930 and worked on by such

titles.

was

returned to Marvel

tage of the popularity of the

period blended illustrational

was lean and

He

X-Men,
Ka-Zar, Daredevil, the Hulk, Sub-Mariner, Luke Cage,
and Captain America. For the Tower line he contributed
to the Thunder Agents saga.
The 1970s found him working on Challengers of the
Unknown, Superman, and Legion of Superheroes at
DC. He also pencilled the World's Greatest SuperHeroes newspaper strip, launched by DC to take advan-

short-lived

with fantasy and comedy. Tuska

Strange.

1960s led

magazine. Tuska was, as alluded to earlier, a pioneering

practitioner of what's come to be called Good Girl Art.
The chief Golden Age manufacturer of this product was
T. T. Scott's Fiction House and Tuska served six years
with the outfit. He drew attractive ladies in a variety of
occupations, from jungle goddess to airplane pilot.
Among them were Camilla in Jungle Comics, Glory
Forbes in Rangers, and Jane Martin in Wings. He also
drew a definite second-banana superguy, the Hooded
Wasp, for Shadow Comics and even managed some

humor fillers
The Tuska

Doc

turning out material for Western, war, romance, and

Tuska

108

at his best

you have

to look

back to the

To

see

forties.

CRIME DOES

From a

story

done while Tuska was the king

Publications, Inc.)

O T PAY

of crime. (Copyright

1948 Leu G/eason

Ed Wheelan
He typified one of the major groups that worked in
comic books during the first big boom of the late 1930s
and early 1940s the years when, to meet the continually increasing demand for new material, artists were
recruited from all over. Some were kids fresh out of
school, some were veteran illustrators from the pulp
magazines, and some were former newspaper strip cartoonists. Wheelan belonged to this last category, which
included such diverse talents as George Storm, Bert
Christman, Tom McNamara, Paul Fung, and C. A.

The

Wheelan work to appear in comic books was

Big Top stuff in Feature Funnies. In the
summer and fall of 1938 the Centaur company put out
two issues of Little Giant Movie Funnies. Copy inside

these small six-and-one-half- by four-and-one-half-inch

black-and-white-magazines touted the fact they were
providing a "whole motion picture show for a dime!!!"

No

mention was made that the contents reprinted Min-

ute Movies newspaper

strips.

1939 Flash Comics was launched. In addition to the Flash himself, you got Hawkman, the
Whip, and Johnny Thunder. And editor Sheldon
Mayer had hired Wheelan to do an eight page-feature.
Wheelan's first original material for comic books was
called Flash Picture Novels and was quite close to
Minute Movies. In Flash #\2 (December, 1940),
Wheelan gave in to "popular demand" and brought
back Minute Movies. He drew forty-three new installments in all. As he'd done with the newspaper strip,
he alternated melodramas and burlesques. Along with
the movies ran animated cartoons, comedy shorts, and
Late

Voight.

He worked in comic books from the late thirties

through the early fifties. Irreverent when it came to the
more serious conventions of popular culture, he spent
those years kidding movies, radio, and even the supermen who helped pay his salary. He also found time to
concoct a highly entertaining burlesque of Sherlock
Holmes in comic book form, purvey hundreds of the
most bewhiskered old vaudeville jokes and, singlehanded, produce one of the earliest EC titles. And all this,
Wheelan felt certain, was after his real career had ended.
Edgar Stow Wheelan was bom in 1888, and by the
time World War started he was well established as a
newspaper cartoonist. In the early 1920s, after having
done various strips for the Hearst newspapers, he
created Minute Movies, which became one of the most
successful features of the decade. Gradually Wheelan

in

travelogues.

On the comedy page two of the MM actors, Fuller

Phun and Archibald Clubb, teamed up as Fat and Slat.

the middle 1930s.

They proved quite popular, and the first complete Fatand-Slat comic book was issued in 1944. It was a compendium of one-pagers in which the team did its best to
perpetrate some of the most venerable and god-awful
jokes known to man. When M. C. Gaines ended his
association with DC to start his EC line, he hired Wheelan to do a Fat-and-Slat quarterly. This lasted four issues,
from 1947 to 1948, and offered yet more ancient jokes
and gags.
Another major Wheelan achievement of the forties
was The Adventures of Padlock Homes. Done for the
Harvey Brothers, it began in Champ Comics in the
spring of 1942 and then moved over to Speed Comics
in 1943. More than a burlesque of Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle's celebrated sleuth, it was also a parody of detective melodramas in general, movie serials, and anything

One

else that

introduced a regular cast of characters. These included

handsome Dick Dare, blonde, pretty Hazel
Dearie, villainous Ralph McSneer, and others. Using the
motion pictures of the day as a take-off point, Wheelan
put his cast thorugh every kind of format: cowboy continuities, airplane adventures, soldier of fortune yams,
detective stories, and comedies. He also kidded newsreels, travelogues, and just about everything else you
were likely to encounter in a movie palace. As newspaper strips grew more serious in the Depression years,
Wheelan started doing longer stories and also adapting
such classics as Ivanhoe and Hamlet. The strip folded
blond,

in

first

reprints of his

was with the

done in the mid-thirties, was Big
Top. This didn't succeed and Wheelan, who long believed that William Randolph Hearst had a hand in his
career troubles, went out of business as a comic strip

circus,

of Wheelan's lifelong fascinations

and

caught Wheelan's fancy.

comic book

Wheelan used
It was lively,
scratchy, and unashamedly bigfoot and did much to
add variety to the comic books of the 1940s. By the
early 1950s he was out of the field. When he died in
Florida in 1966, he was working on, appropriately
Throughout

his last strip,

his

the style he'd perfected

artist. For quite a while, he kept hoping for a comeback,

but that never happened. What happened instead was
comic books.

in

career,

the 1920s.

enough, a series of clown paintings.

110

PAT AND SLAT COMICS

The quintessence

of the bigfoot style. (Copyright

1986 William M. Gaines.)

Al Williamson
The impact

Raymond on comic book

art was
Gordon Sunday pages were first
reprinted in King Comics early in 1936, and by the late
1930s and early 1940s disciples such as John Lehti,
George Papp, and Sheldon Moldoff were doing original
comic book work in their own versions of Raymond's
heroic dry-brush style. Al Williamson, perhaps the most
successful Raymond idolator of them all, started work-

of Alex

pay the bills," he's explained, "but was kind of footloose

and fancy-free. So it didn't bother me too much. could
play the prima donna and get away with it."
Williamson did some of his best-remembered artwork
during the four years he was with EC. Most of his output
appeared in Weird Fantasy and Weird Science, and later
in tamer EC titles like Valor and Piracy. It was here that
he fully developed his sweeping panoramas, intricate
jungle landscapes, and towering fantasy cities. Williamson continued to rely on his various artist buddies for
assistance. He explained his reasons for this by saying,
"Well, Frank and Roy and Angelo Torres were all good
friends. And
enjoyed drawing figures very much.
didn't like drawing backgrounds. And I was deathly
afraid of the brush
was afraid I'd botch up the inking
with the brush.
Frank, I think, inked roughly about
two or three jobs for me, and
pencilled them. Roy
Krenkel pencilled the backgrounds and
inked those.
But one of the main reasons, guess, that worked with
them was that we had a hell of a lot of fun."
After EC, Williamson drew for a number of other
publishers, including Marvel, where he did horror, Westem, romance, and war stories. Finally in the middle
1960s he got to draw Flash Gordon for King Features's
short-lived line of comic books. He also did a Secret
Agent X-9 short story. Williamson says he told King, "I
want the filler to be X-9 so have this break of doing a
civilian thing, because hate doing the same thing all the
I

considerable. His Flash

ing in comics in 1948. Eventually he got a chance to

draw several Raymond creations, including Flash Gordon and Secret Agent X-9.
Williamson was bom in New York in 1931 and grew
up in Bogota, Colombia. His first encounter with Flash
Gordon was in Spanish-language reprints. He and his
family returned to the United States in the early 1940s
and while in his teens he began attending the New York

Cartoonists & Illustrators School. His teacher for the

Saturday-morning sketch class was Bume Hogarth. It
was Hogarth's practice to have his more gifted pupils
help out on Tarzan, and Williamson took a turn pencilling some Sunday pages in 1948.

Over at Famous Funnies, Inc., the page rates weren't

and editor Steve Douglas was receptive to young
artists. For Douglas's Heroic Comics # 51 (November,
1948) Williamson did his first professional comic book
work, a two-page story entitled Thin Ice on Shell Bank
Creek, about an incident of everyday heroism. He soon
moved on to Westerns and by 1950, with some inking
help from his friend Frank Frazetta, Williamson was
doing the lead stories in Toby Press's John Wayne. He
also drew for the company's Billy The Kid, most notably
a story based on the exploits of movie hero Rock Hudhigh,

Soon after that the syndicate offered him the X-9

newspaper strip. He began drawing it in 1967, under the
new title of Secret Agent Corrigan, with Archie Goodwin
time."

providing the scripts. He stayed with the spy strip until

1980.
Williamson next did an adaptation of The Empire
Strikes Back for Marvel and an adaptation of the
Flash Gordon movie for Western. Williamson, with
Goodwin doing the writing, took over the Star Wars
comic strip and stayed with it until it folded. He feels
that "the papers don't seem to want adventure strips

son.

By

was able to indulge

and science fiction. He started
doing work, sometimes assisted by Roy Krenkel and
sometimes by Frazetta, for Forbidden Worlds, Danger Is
Our Business, Jet, and Out of the Night. In 1952, just
before he turned twenty-one, he commenced his association with EC. He went up there at the suggestion of Wally
Wood and was hired. He's said that that period was an
enjoyable one for him. "A lot of guys were already married and had to turn the stuff out and make a living and
the following year Williamson

his interest in fantasy

stuff." Presently he is working

comic books and will probably stay there for
awhile. "Well, I've got to keep making money," he ex.

they just want funny

again

in

plains. "I've got

112

a family to feed."

THIS MACHINE WILL

PROBE THE INNERMOST RECESSES OF

HIS MINP ANP MAkE
VISUAL HIS UNCON-

SCIOUS FANTASIES.

Williamson specialty, flamboyant science-fantasy. (Copyright

Group.)

1974 Marvel Comics

Barry Windsor-Smith
It

was with the help

of a barbarian that Smith

first

comics that have a strong pre-Raphaelite look. Because

of the wide range of his influences Smith brought a new
look to the comics of the seventies. Since then several
lesser artists have been influenced by him.
Smith left the Conan color comic after issue # 24,
having stayed around long enough to introduce Red

gained

famous barConan. The London-bom Smith

recognition and attention; namely, the most

barian of

was

just

artist to

them

when he became, in 1970, the first

draw Marvel's Conan the Barbarian. That same

year his peers

him

all

twenty-one

best

new

in

Academy of Comic Book Arts voted

both 1971 and 1972 Conan was
comic book by the ACBA, and in 1972
named best artist by the fans. Nothing
the

Sonja. He also drew Conan for the early issues of the

black-and-white Savage Tales, which debuted in 1971

talent. In

judged the best

Smith was also

done since has quite equalled the impact of

early work in the realm of swords and sorcery.
he's

and offered somewhat more adult material. Smith did a

few jobs as well for Savage Sword of Conan, a blackand-white magazine that came along in 1974. He also
worked on a handful of other features for Marvel, drawing, briefly, Daredevil, Iron Man, Tower of Shadows, and
Dr. Strange. "If Smith was perfect for conjuring up
Conan's era," one comics historian has commented, "he
was just as clever at inventing a mysterious world for
Strange's tales of the constant struggle between white
and black magic. Like Steve Ditko and Gene Colan
before him, Smith rose to the task of interpreting
Strange and his version ranks with the best." In addition,
Smith contributed drawings to magazines ranging from
New York to National Lampoon.
Smith pretty much took a leave of absence from
comic books in the middle 1970s. He founded Gorblimey Press to produce his own posters and portfolios and has made infrequent returns to comics,
turning out stories for Star Reach and Epic Illustrated.
More recently he's worked on a Machine Man miniseries and drawn three issues of X-Men and a Thing
story for Marvel Fanfare.

that

first few issues of Conan the Barbarian were

shaky and unsure. "His strong sense of design and

Smith's

bit

pick precisely the right angles set him apart,

though," as one critic has pointed out, "and each book
he drew was better than the last." It probably stands to
reason that an artist who lists his two major influences
as Jack Kirby and Alphonse Mucha would turn out
pages that were somewhat different from the usual Marvel bullpen product. As Smith developed and improved,
his renderings of these tales of the Hyborean Age displayed an appealing blend of comic book and art nouveau touches. Smith's material, notes The World Encyclopedia of Comics, "was heavily-laden with intricate
designs at times bordering on ornate, art deco-like
scenes and backgrounds and eye-pleasing composition and layout." By the time he gave up drawing Robert
ability to

Howard's warrior king, his work had matured even

and he'd assimilated even more. These later
pages are impressively done and are among the few in
E.

further

114

A beautifully rendered Conan page, as our hero battles a tentacled horror while complaining about the opposite sex. Script by

Group.)

Roy Thomas. (Copyright

1974 Marvel Comics

Basil Wolverton
He billed himself as a producer of preposterous pictures
who prowl this perplexing planet,

humor

and from the

Mystic

1950s Wolverton
turned out some of the most audacious and individual
humor pages to be found in comic books. He also drew
some of the most wildly adventurous science fiction ever
seen in comic books. He could only have flourished in
the eclectic comic book business of forty years ago,
when nobody was quite certain what you could and
couldn't get

His

late

1930s

away

into the early

Invincible that

a reporter on the Daily Dally, almost made it into the

world of newspaper strips. In 1944 United Features
signed Wolverton up and offered a Scoop Scuttle daily
strip. According to Wolverton nothing came of this because "there was a newsprint cutback because of the war

with.

magnum opus in the funny field was undoubtedly

Powerhouse Pepper.

It

was

for Marvel that

features included Flap Flipflop the Flying Flash,

Moot and

his Magic Snoot (a parody of Ibis the

appeared in the magician's own magazine), Bingbang Buster and His Horse Hedy, the Culture
Corner (conducted by Dr. Croucher K. Cronk, Q.O.C.,
short for Queer Old Coot), and Scoop Scuttle. Scoop,

of the peculiar people

he created

Scoop was

many

scuttled."

much in tune with the sort of baggy-pants burlesque

comedy that was popular during World War II. Before
Powerhouse was many issues old, Wolverton had given

comic book contemporaries,

the Manhattan area. A native
of the Pacific Northwest, he stayed out there most of the
time and did his contributing by mail. After breaking into
comic books in the late thirties he also tried his hand at
science fiction. His major work in this vein was Spacehawk, which began in Target Comics in 1940. In this
feature he depicted the intricate alien landscapes that

way

came

the character, the only bald-headed superhero of his day,

showed up
own a superman suit and

in

the spring of 1942. Powerhouse,

in

Joker Comics # 1,

didn't

who

Unlike

usually combatted evil wearing a striped turtleneck

sweater, slacks,

and heavy workshoes. The feature was

very

compulsive fascination with alliteration and

where he couldn't even
sign his name straight. Instead he'd use "by Basil Baboonbrain Wolverton," "by Basil Weirdwit Wolverton,"
"by Basil Bucketbeak Wolverton," etc. He was equally
fond of internal rhyme, and his dialogue as well as the
numerous signs and posters that cluttered almost every
to his

eventually he reached a point

inch of wall

and often the floor and

asteroids

fungi.

The

extraterrestrial races

he peopled

his

awesome

planets with were usually a mixture of the vegetable and

the phallic, most often resembling mobile cucumbers

ceiling as well

and gherkins.

Much of the stuff Wolverton did after leaving comic

books is not his best. He upped the ugly content, drawing people who looked even more like private parts,
animated intestines, or malignant growths. This is especially notable in his book Barflize and in what he drew
for Mad and Plop. In his later years he also did some
serious illustrations based on the Bible for a religious
magazine called The Plain Truth. He died in the early

Powerhouse his army physical. The three doctors

are Dr. Ash Gash, Dr. Bill Drill, and Dr. Jack Hack.
All in all Wolverton produced nearly five hundred
pages about Powerhouse over the next seven years,
sending him to just about every spot on Earth and to

unknown planets. His hairless hero

Gay Comics, Tessie the Typist, Millie
the Model, and in five issues of his own magazine. For
some reason there was a five-year lapse between issue
# 1 and issue # 2. "I was never able to make much sense
heretofore
in

The decor of most of his planets, moons, and

was dominated by monolithic piles of rock,

deep jagged chasms, and warty foliage suggestive of

elephantine vegetables, gigantic innards, and runaway

giving

held forth

in

to characterize his highly individual version of the

universe.

were full of the stuff. "Zounds! Your snappers are as

sound as a hound's," observes one of the physicians

some

of his

Wolverton didn't work

first

Joker,

1980s.
In

one of

his last interviews

he

listed

his biblical

drawings as his favorite work of his entire career. But

when asked what he'd like to be remembered for,
Wolverton replied, "Some people will remember me
wear around
longest for the disreputable pants
home.
Regarding comic books, should like to be
"
remembered for Powerhouse Pepper.

once recalled.
"To even matters, though, they were never able to make
much sense out of what they bought from me."
Before the forties concluded he turned out over three
hundred pages of other funny stuff for comic books. His
of their publishing policies," Wolverton

116

AT THAT
MOMENT
SPACEMAN
DROPS

FROM
TUE SKY,

AND
LANDS
WITH
DEADLY
IMPACT

ON THE
CREATURE'S

SKULL.

iAi^^W
AND GOES TO
CAPTAIN DAKK,
WHO HAS FALLEN
FROM THE TREE.

SPACEHAWK.'
TAKE IT EASY,
IF ONLY YOU'D SCAPTAlN DAKK/
ARRIVED SOONER' L SEE WHAT I

IT'S

I'LL

TOO LATE TO

SAVE MY BODY/
BUT MY BRAIN
YOU COULD SAVE

I'M AFRAID YOU

DON'T REALIZE

WHAT YOU'RE
ASKING, CAPTAIN.'

IT/ WITH YOUR

GREAT SURGICAL

KNOWLEDGE, VOU COULD

GRAFT IT INTO ONE OF
THE BEASTS OF THIS JUNGLE
PERHAPS THEN I COULD
AVENGE MY MEN'

Spacehawk featured Wolverton's

1940 Novelty Press. Inc.)

bizarre vegetation

and

alien creatures. (Copyright

'

Wally

Wood

Wood was one of the bright young men who burned out
too soon, the comics field equivalent of jazz musicians
like Bix Beiderbecke and Charlie Parker. He was an
impressive artist, was successful while still youthful, and
then proceeded, self-jinxed, to betray his talent and de-

out advertising art for such accounts as Alka-Seltzer and

Dr. Pepper, as well as gum cards for Topps.
Although his work in the 1960s wasn't as strong, he
was kept busy. For Marvel he worked on such superheroes as the Avengers, Daredevil, and the Human Torch.

stroy himself.

The Tower

and mostly self-taught, Wood

began drawing for comic books when he was twenty.
In 1949, still in his early twenties, he went to work for
EC. "After being exploited by nearly everyone in the
business," he once explained, "I finally found a home
at good old EC." In talking about Wood's work during
this period, Pete Hamill has said, "The drawing was
wonderful. Wood had learned much from the men
who came before him; his faces owed a debt to Hal
Foster
Wood's women were derived from Eisner, as
were his deep rich shadings and the dazzling patterns
of his comic book pages. But Wood had taken these
influences, mixed them up, and made something of his
kid from Minnesota

side of

Weird Science and Weird Fantasy that

developed a way of drawing gadgets,
technical hardware, space gear, and spacecraft that was
distinctly his own. Many a later artist borrowed from

books

excelled.

He

him. The impressive Wood clutter became a trademark.

In a story called My World in Weird Science, he appeared as himself in the final panel to explain his credo
directly to the reader. "My world is the world of sciencefiction,"

he explained. "Conceived

in

and sometimes draw

even drew for semiunderThe Realist. The Disney parody
to create

He

Wood

that was, unfortunately, to surface

more

and more as time went by.

Wood's lifestyle and method of working weren't exactly conducive to good health and well-being. There
were periods of heavy drinking, alternating with backbreaking stretches of drawing. Overworked, sometimes
running a free-form sort of sweatshop to get the stuff
out, Wood plugged ahead. Increasingly unhappy with
most of his editors, he decided to become a publisher
himself. This resulted in an initially impressive magazine
he called witzend. In another of his publications he took
several swings at editors. "Do not seek to be a creative
writer or artist," he advised. "Do not CARE about doing
anything good. That will only put you at the mercy of
those who will always hate you because you can do
something they can't."
In the 1970s, he did some less than first-rate inking for
DC and others. For military-oriented publications he
drew Cannon, a hard-boiled intrigue feature, and Sally
Forth, a comedy-adventure strip in the Annie Fanny
mode. He returned to fantasy late in the decade, doing
an impressive job on The Wizard King. In 1978 Wood
had a stroke. "I saw some of the late drawings and they
were heartbreaking," Hammil said. "Wood's art had always been marked by a fluid accuracy; he could draw
immense spaceships in precise detail, and make a
human face laugh with a few lines. Looking at those late
drawings, you knew something was terribly wrong." In
his last years Wood also suffered from kidney disease.
Among the last things he drew were some pathetic stories for a pornographic comic book.
By 1981 his health had deteriorated even further. In

He worked on all the EC titles, but it was in the science

he

him

ground publications like

he did for the latter publication showed a crude, nasty

own."
fiction

line hired

TH.U.N.D.E.R. Agents.

my mind and

placed upon paper with pencil and ink and brush and
sweat and a great deal of love for my world. For I am
a science-fiction artist. My name is Wood."
For Mad he worked in a lighter manner, one that
sometimes hinted at Walt Kelly as a source of inspiration. He stayed with the magazine when it switched from
comic book to black-and-white format and also drew for
many of its imitators Panic, Humbug, Trump, and
Plop. Wood had a knack for imitating and kidding the
work of others and this served him well in doing takeoffs
of Caniff, Disney, and Peanuts.
Wood accomplished quite a bit in the 1950s. He
served a stint of ghosting The Spirit, collaborated with
Jack Kirby on an unsuccessful SF newspaper strip called
Sky Masters, and did illustrations for Galaxy and other
science fiction magazines and comic book work for Marvel, Harvey, Charlton, and DC. He also began turning

November

Wood

of that year

shot himself.

he had said, "I don't

whether I'm an illustrator or a
cartoonist or whatever. I'm an artist; do it for a living
Looking back, had fun. For the first five years of EC
was having a ball. would rather draw than eat maybe."
Earlier, reflecting

worry about words,

on

his career,

like

118

jlk

MEM 4BQARP
PREPARE
TAKGOFff

It's a personal feeling

deeply personal

The Wood approach

Eisner.)

this...

not scientific, not cold

to gadgetry. in the service of the Spirit. (Copyright

and clear

79(36 Will

but

Berni Wrightson
House of

Like several younger generation comic book artists,

Wrightson has built his style out of bits and pieces of the
styles of earlier comic book artists. "I think any other
artist
ever looked at studied to one extent or another,
and learned something from," he replied when asked
about his influences. "It's hard to say where anything
comes from. It's all this big hodgepodge. And it's hopefully something original by the time I'm done with it."
Narrowing down the list to a handful of people, he said
his major sources of inspiration had been "most of the
EC guys and Frazetta." That he's successfully asI

all

is

work has met with. The

him "possibly the most popu-

enthusiastic acceptance his

Comics Journal has called

lar artist to emerge from comics'

short-lived renaissance

of the late 1960s."

Bernard Albert Wrightson was bom in 1948 and

began working in comic books in 1969. By that time
he'd already appeared in assorted fanzines and worked
as a staff cartoonist on the Baltimore Sun. Of this latter
job he's said, "I just worked in a big room with a bunch
of other artists and most of the work was photo retouching and paste-up, layout-type work and not a lot of cartooning or illustrating."
Wrightson drew Nightmaster for
illustrating

House of

stories

Secrets.

for

By

their

utilized

DC and then began

House of Mystery and

this time, the early

By autumn

own

bimonthly.

had

his

on

several of his

Warren

tales.

He's also done full-color posters and tried his hand at

portfolios. Among them was one based on Edgar Allan
Poe stories and another derived from Frankenstein. In
1982 he did a comic book adaptation of the George
Romero-Stephen King movie Creepshow. A long-time
admirer of King's books, he recently illustrated King's
Cycle of the Werewolf. "I've read everything he's ever
written. Yeah, I'm a big fan of his."
Wrightson is likely to keep experimenting and
branching out. He has in the past dropped out of
comics, saying things like, "I've reached a point where
I've outgrown comics." More recently he's retracted
such statements, explaining, "I realize now that I never
did and probably never will." Yet he still feels it's
important to get away from the field periodically.

1970s, both

were doing sedate versions of the EC horror

tales of twenty years before, complete with grotesque
hosts and heavily ironic endings. Wrightson, who'd
grown up on ECs, fit right in. He also concocted quite
a few intricate yet poster-like covers. During this period
Wrightson, in collaboration with writer Len Wein,
created what has been called "his greatest popular success in comics." Swamp Thing first lurched into view in
these

(June-July, 1971).

following year he

including Al Williamson,
and Frank Frazetta evidenced by the

his influences

Ingels,

# 92

Wrightson did some imaginative work with the character, paying homage not only to EC but to dozens of
horror movies he'd seen and relished in his youth. The
impression made by his Swamp Thing was chiefly responsible for his winning the best artist award from the
now-defunct Academy of Comic Book Arts two years
in a row. He abandoned the character in 1974 to move
over to Warren.
At Warren in Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella
Wrightson worked in black and white. He has a knack
for getting strong effects with light and shadow, which
he used well in these stories. There were adaptations of
H. P. Lovecraft and Poe as well as some written by
Wrightson himself. By this time he'd discovered illustrators like Joseph Clement Coll and Franklin Booth and
was applying some of their techniques. Booth (18741948) had adapted the look of steel and wood engravings to pen-and-ink drawings, an approach Wrightson

similated

Graham

of the

Secrets

titles

120

The

chilling,

son.)

atmospheric world of Berni Wrightson. (Copyright

1984 Bemi

Wright-

The Great Comic Book

An
What

follows

is

come by and a good deal less expensive,

For those of you who want fuller listings, we suggest
consulting Robert Overstreet's Comic Book Price Guide
and Jerry Bails's Who's Who of American Comic Books.

a suggested reading/looking/collecting

easier to

and by no means complete, giving

just the highlights of each artist's career and what we
consider the best examples of his work. Along with
original comic book appearances, we've also included
some reprints and compilations. Most of these are
list.

It's

Artists

Informal Bibliography

selective

Overstreet also provides dates and current prices for

most of the

123

titles

on our

list.

Neal

Adams

Dick Briefer

Deadman 1-7 (1985

Frankenstein 1-33

reprints)

Echo of Futu repast 1-4

Prize 7-54,

Green Lantern 76-87, 89

John Buscema

Green Lantem/Green Arrow 1-7 (1983

reprints)

Avengers 41-66

X-Men 56-63

X-Men

Conan 25-36, 41-56, 93-126

1-3 (1983

Classics

reprints)

Savage Sword of Conan 1-5, 47-58

John Byrne

Matt Baker
Classics Illustrated

Alpha

32

1-28

Flight

E-Man 6-9

36-60

Fight

56-68

Golden Features

(Blackthome, 1985)

Reprints Baker's Flamingo

Fantastic

strip.

Four 209-218, 251-267, 269

Incredible

Phantom Lady 13-23

Hulk 314

to date

to date

Marvel Preview 11

X-Men 108-109, 111-143

Carl Barks
At one time or another, Byrne has also drawn
virtually every character at Marvel.

Reprints

32

of his non-duck stories.

George Carlson
The most

accessible source of Barks's Disney material

Jingle Jangle 1-42

Another Rainbow Publishing, Inc. Their Carl Barks

Library series and their Gladstone line of comic
books contain reprints of much of Barks's Donald
Duck and Uncle Scrooge material.
is

Puzzle Fun Comics 1-2

With the exception of some puzzle pages

in

Famous

Funnies, the above represents Carlson's complete

contribution to comic books.

Dan Barry
Howard Chay kin

Action 131-185

American Flagg! 1-12, 15-26

Gangbusters 1-10

Star Wars 1-10

C. C.

Beck

Gene Colan

Fatman 1-3

Howard

Shazam! 1-10

30-31

Whiz 1-22

Nathaniel

the

Duck

Dusk 1-4

Nathaniel Dusk

Charles Biro

Boy 3

to date

long after he stopped

Jack Cole

stories.

National 13

for several years.

Daredevil 2-10
Plus

many

1-4

Tomb of Dracula 1-70

title

Crime Does Not Pay

Covers

Night Force 1-14

Biro did covers for this

drawing any

(comic) 4-15, 17-20, 24-27,

(first series,

Police Comics 1-30

Ghost

1941)

covers on later issues.

artists

evidence

Smash 18-38

Zip 1-15

124

and a

less

in later issues

dedicated Cole are

in

Reed Crandall

Marvel Mystery 1-28

Blackhawk 10-11

Menace 1-6

Feature 44-60
Military

Lou Fine

12-22

Crandall's

EC work

Crack \-4, 11-22

can most easily be seen by way

of Russ Cochran's various albums

and

National 12-18

reprints.

Smash 14-22

Jack Davis

Wonderworld 3-11

Rawhide Kid 33-35, 125

Yak Yak 1-2

(Dell 4-Color

The Cochran books and magazines

source of Davis's

EC

many

Fine also produced

1186, 1348)

covers for Hit, National,

Wonderworld, and Mystery Men.

are also the best

Frank Frazetta

work.

Durango Kid 1-16

Steve Ditko

Shining Knight

Amazing Spider-Man 1-38, Annual 1-2

(reprinted in

1,

Thun'da 1

Marvel Tales 137-177)

White Indian 11

Captain

Atom 78-87

Blue Beetle 1-5 (1967)

Fred Goardineer

Tales of the Mysterious Traveler

2-12

Action 1-28

Big Shot 1-14

Will Eisner

Durango Kid 19-41

National 1-3

Smash 1-13

Paul Gustavson

Will Eisner's Quarterly

1 to date

The most economical source

series of reprint

Marvel Mystery 1-21

Police 1-22

The Spirit is the

books and magazines issued by

Kitchen Sink Press,

of

Smash 22-67

Inc.

Bob Kane
Lee Bias

Famous

Adventure 257-269
Black Cat 3-29

Famous

Rangers 21-28

F-6

1st Edition

Reprints

Batman

1.

C-28

First Edition

Reprints Detective 27.

Rook 1-7
Gil

Kane

George Evans

Conan

Blackhawk 244-246

Green Lantern 1-61, 68-75, 156

Captain Video 1-6

Sword of the Atom

Evans's

EC work

is

available in the

Cochran

1 (first series,

127-134

1-4, Special 1-2

reprints.

Wah

Kelly

Pogo Possum 1-16

Bill Everett

Daredevil

the Barbarian

1941)

Heroic 1-9, 12

125

Fairy Tale Parade

1-9

Our Gang

10-58

1-6, 8,

Plans are afoot to reprint

all

of Kelly's

Sheldon Mayer

comic book

work.

Ail-American 1-59

Best of

JackKirby

Fantastic

New

64-83

Four 1-102

Sugar

Gods 1-6 (1984

lists

perhaps, a

is,

fill

Golden Lad 1-5

this entire section

Shield Wizard

and then

into

3,

Top-Notch 2-8

Frank Miller

Bernard Krigstein
Journey

1-98

Mort Meskin

good place to remind you that our

and provide only highlights.

comic books, would

some.

& Spike

Action 42-121 (most issues)

bibliography, after nearly a half century in

full

Unknown Worlds

11, 12,

Daredevil 158-191 (1979-1983)

43

Marvel Tales 98, 106-107, 142, 157, 159

Marvel Team-Up 100

Strange Tales 10, 15, 22, 42, 45, 59, 61

Ronin 1-6

Yet again the Cochran reprints are the best source of

EC

Krigstein's

entire issue, including

reprints)

are not complete

Kirby's

55

cover.

Journey into Mystery 83-90, 101-125

This

29, 37, 41, 43, 47,

Funny Stuff 5
SM wrote and drew the

Adventure 72-90
Detective Comics

DC

Bob Montana

work.

Archie 1

Joe Kubert

Jackpot

The Brave and the Bold 1-24

Flash Comics 62-76,

Our Army

at

4,

Pep 22-36

88-104

War 83-170

Klaus Nordling
Lady Luck 86-90

Harvey Kurtzman

National 1-22, 42-72

Harvey Kurtzman Comics

Smash 42-85

Goodman Beaver
Kurtzman's

EC work

is

available in the

Nordling's

Cochran

Lady Luck

is

also available in

Pierce trade paperbacks. His

reprints.
in

Black Knight 1-5

Red Dragon 5-7

1, 4,

the recent Blackthorne reprint of the

Carter,

first

issue of

George Perez
(second series)

Avengers 141-144, 147-162, 167-171, 194-000

5
Crisis

Speed

two Ken

Miller can be found

National Comics.

Joe Maneely

Ringo Kid

Pen

Spaceman 1-7

Infinite

Earths 1-12

New

Teen Titans/Tales of the Teen Titans

(1980-1984) 1-4, 6-34, 37-50, Annual 1-3

Jesse Marsh

New

Tarzan 1-153

Gene Autry 1-25

John Carter of Mars 1-3 (Gold Key

on

reprints,

Teen Titans (1984-1985) 1-5

Perez has also drawn many other strips for Marvel,

and countless covers for both Marvel and DC.

1964)

126

Wendy

Joe Shuster

Pini

Elfquest 1-21

Famous

Elfquest 1 to date (Man/el color reprints of the above

Famous

material)

C-26

1st Edition

Reprints Action

1.

C-61

1st Edition

Reprints

Superman

1.

Bob Powell
Cave

Girl

Bill

11-14

Moon Knight
Moon Knight
New Mutants

Jumbo 5-28

Man

Black 1-4

in

Military

1-13

Shadow

Vol.

Sienkiewicz

6 No. 12 - Vol. 9 No. 5

1-15, 17-20, 22-26. 2S-30

Special Edition

1-3 (1983

reprints)

18-31

Walt Simonson

Powell's Mr. Mystic has been reprinted in

some

of

Detective

Kitchen Sink's Spirit magazines.

437-443

Thor 337-354. 357

Mac Raboy

to date

John Stanley

Green Lama 1-8

The

Master Comics 15-39

best source of Stanley's

work

is

the

new

Little

Lulu Library series published by Another Rainbow.

Jerry Robinson

James Steranko

Batman 37
Entire issue

is

Strange Tales 151-163

by Robinson.

Nick Fury, Agent of

Black Terror 23-26 (with Mort Meskin)

Detective 71-73, 74-76,
Fighting

Yank 25-29

79

(with Meskin)

Green Hornet 21, 25-29

Frank

Thome

Korak,

Son of Tarzan 46-51

Son of Tomahawk 131-140

Amazing Spider-Man 39-95, 106-118

AlexToth
All-American 88, 92, 96, 98-102

Alex Schomburg

Adventure 418-419

Jon Juan

Crime and Punishment 66

of the very few examples of his interior

Entire issue

artwork.

Numerous

issues of

1940s Marvel

titles

is

by Toth.

Rook 3-4

are graced

with his distinctive covers. His covers are also to be

George Tnska

found on issues of Green Hornet. Speed. Exciting.

The Black Terror, and The Fighting Yank. To name

Crime Does Not Pay 51-64

Jungle 5-13, 46-55

but a few.

Uncle

Sam

John Severin
Prize

ELD.

Red Sonja 1-11

John Romita

One

S. HI.

Ed Wheelan

Comics Western 85-109

Severin's

most impressive work can be found

Cochran

EC

in

Fat

the

& Slat

\^\

Flash Comics 1-58

reprints.

127

1-2 (1983

reprints)

Speed Comics 25-37

Basil Wolverton

Two

Joker 1-27, 29-31

Holmes axe
Blackbeard's Sherlock Holmes in

episodes of Wheelan's Padlock

reprinted in

Bill

Target Vol.

America (Abrahams, 1979).

Gordon 3-5

(King, 1960s)

John Wayne 2-4, 6-8,

EC

3,

No. 10

be found

in

Archival Press's

1978 Spacehawk

trade paperback.

Al Williamson

Williamson's

No. 5 - Vol.

Six adventures of Wolverton's lone wolf of space are

to

Flash

1,

stuff

is

16,

Wally

18

in the

Wood

Thunder Agents 1-11

Cochran

reprints.

Wood's EC work

is

Cochran reprints.
The Outer Space Spirit

available in the

His Spirit stories are

in

(Kitchen Sink, 1983).

Barry Windsor-Smith
Conan 1-16, 19-24

Berni Wrightson

Conan Special

House of Mystery 193-195,

Edition (1982 reprint)

Epic 16

House of Secrets 92-94,

Savage Tales 1-3

Swamp

128

Thing 1-10

204, 207, 209

96, 100,

103

*>

>$12.T5

SIXTV LIVELV, AFFECTIONATE ESSAVS, RON GOULART PRESENTS THE GREAT COMIC BOOK
ARTISTS: THEIR STNLES, THEIR CAREERS, THEIR LIVES. EACH ESSAV IS ILLUSTRATED WITH A
BEAUTIFUL FULL-PAGE SAMPLE OF THE ARTIST'S FINEST WORK, AND A BIBLIOGRAPHY
IN

PROVIDES LISTINGS OF THE ARTISTS' PUBLISHED WORKS AS A GUIDE TO COLLECTORS.

HERE ARE T\4E STARS OF COMICS' GOLDEN AGE, INCLUDING GEORGE CARLSON, JACK COLE,
AND JOE SHUSTER; THE GREAT EC COMICS ARTISTS OF THE FIFTIES, SUCH AS JACK DAVIS,
HARVEV KURTZMAN, AND BERNARD KRIGSTEIN; THE ARTISTS OF THE MARVEL COMICS
RENAISSANCE OF THE SIXTIES, INCLUDING STEVE DITKO, JOHN BUSCEMA, AND JOHN SEVERIN;
TIMELESS ARTISTS SUCH AS WILL EISNER, JACK KIRBV, AND WALT KELLV; AND TODAV'S
SUPERSTARS-FRANK MILLER, JOHN BVRNE, GEORGE PEREZ, AND MANV MORE. FROM THE
1930S TO THE PRESENT, FROM SUSPENSE TO SUPERHEROES, FROM THE UNSUNG CARTOONISTS
OF THE GOLDEN AGE TO THE FAN FAVORITES OF TODAV, HERE IS THE WORLD OF COMIC BOOKS AS
SEEN THROUGH THE LIVES OF THEIR CREATORS-THE GfJEAT COMIC BOOK ARTISTS.

AUTHOR OF OVER 125 BOOKS, IS ONE OF AMERICA'S FOREMOST COMICS HISTORIANS

AND A RESPECTED SCIENCE FICTION WRITER. HE LIVES IN WESTON, CONNECTICUT.
RON Goulart,

COVER ART BN JOHN BVRNE

ST.

MARTIN'S PRESS

175 FIFTH
PRINTED

AVENUE
IN U.S.A.

NEW

VORK,

N.V. 10010

ISBN D-312-3M557-7