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.