Emil Gershwin's Crime and Punishment

We all have our favourite artists, across a variety of media, but outside of a formal art education, how we discover the artists we come to like sometimes owes more to happenstance than anything else. I've liked Alex Toth's work in comics and animation for a long time, but it was only through a letter Toth wrote to Emil Gershwin's family that made me take note of Gershwin's work. As well known and admired as artists like Toth can be, it's easy to forget that artists of their calibre have their influences as well, and it's always worthwhile to see where that path leads. (Case in point: it was Genndy Tartakovsky's 'Samurai Jack' that led me to Charley Harper.)

Emil Gershwin worked in comics during the 40s and 50s for a variety of companies, including Fox, National (now DC), Quality (also now DC), Lew Gleason, and others. He did some superhero work - Starman, Kid Eternity, Captain Marvel, for example - but primarily he did genre work: crime stories, science fiction, and adventure strips.

Toth's letter to Gershwin's family praising their dad's work isn't online anymore, but this is what Toth wrote elsewhere about Gershwin as an influence: "...liked it as a blend of Alex Raymond's 'Flash' head/figural work - and Crane's dot-eyed and cartoonysimple doll-like figures, etc., a hoot, to me - always a fan - thru all his phases - via many publ'rs' books!"

From Crime & Punishment #28 (Lew Gleason, 1950), here's Emil Gershwin:

Russ Heath - "...one of the gods of comics," per Howard Chaykin

Chaykin isn't wrong - Russ Heath is still an active professional artist after more than fifty years in the business, widely respected both for his body of work across a range of genres and for his skill as a visual storyteller. I suppose that one measure of his esteem is the extent to which Roy Lichtenstein "borrowed" from his work to create his 1960s Pop Art paintings. For the general comics audience, much of his acclaim likely comes from the western and war stories he illustrated for DC and Marvel during the 1950s and 1960s; for example, he co-created the Haunted Tank serial for DC, a popular, long-running feature that has been collected recently via DC's Showcase Presents line (Volume 1 and Volume 2). More recently, Heath provided art for an issue of DC's critically acclaimed 'Starman' series, a flashback issue set in the late 1800s. This issue will be reprinted in the fourth and final omnibus collection for that series, to be published in late 2009. Heath is also involved in the current Jonah Hex series being published by DC, providing art on several issues collected in the 'Jonah Hex Volume 5 - Luck Runs Out' trade paperback.

Before the Haunted Tank, Starman, and Jonah Hex, however, Heath worked for Marvel/Atlas, and here are a pair of stories from Menace #8, published in 1953.

Gene Colan

Confession time - it took a long time for me to appreciate Gene Colan's work. When I was a kid, his work on Daredevil and Tomb of Dracula never appealed to me - not that I was a big fan of Marvel stuff in general anyways - and it wasn't until I took a look at his later independent work (Detectives Inc., Nathaniel Dusk, Ragamuffins, etc.) years later that I began to see what I'd missed, with his ability to create mood and suspense on the printed page.

This is a genre piece scripted by Stan Lee, a romance story from Teen-Age Romance #86, published in 1962 by Zenith (aka Marvel).

Everett Raymond Kinstler

Everett Raymond Kinstler is another renowned artist who got his start in comics. Here's a story illustrated by Kinstler from Eerie #10, published by Avon in 1952: