Chicago
Chicago the City of Chicago, is the most populous city in Illinois, as well as the third most populous city in the United States. With an estimated population of 2,716,450, it is the most populous city in the Midwest. Chicago is the principal city of the Chicago metropolitan area referred to as Chicagoland, the county seat of Cook County, the second most populous county in the United States; the metropolitan area, at nearly 10 million people, is the third-largest in the United States, the fourth largest in North America and the third largest metropolitan area in the world by land area. Located on the shores of freshwater Lake Michigan, Chicago was incorporated as a city in 1837 near a portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River watershed and grew in the mid-nineteenth century. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which destroyed several square miles and left more than 100,000 homeless, the city made a concerted effort to rebuild; the construction boom accelerated population growth throughout the following decades, by 1900 Chicago was the fifth largest city in the world.
Chicago made noted contributions to urban planning and zoning standards, including new construction styles, the development of the City Beautiful Movement, the steel-framed skyscraper. Chicago is an international hub for finance, commerce, technology, telecommunications, transportation, it is the site of the creation of the first standardized futures contracts at the Chicago Board of Trade, which today is the largest and most diverse derivatives market gobally, generating 20% of all volume in commodities and financial futures. O'Hare International Airport is the one of the busiest airports in the world, the region has the largest number of U. S. highways and greatest amount of railroad freight. In 2012, Chicago was listed as an alpha global city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network, it ranked seventh in the entire world in the 2017 Global Cities Index; the Chicago area has one of the highest gross domestic products in the world, generating $680 billion in 2017. In addition, the city has one of the world's most diversified and balanced economies, not being dependent on any one industry, with no single industry employing more than 14% of the workforce.
Chicago's 58 million domestic and international visitors in 2018, made it the second most visited city in the nation, behind New York City's approximate 65 million visitors. The city ranked first place in the 2018 Time Out City Life Index, a global quality of life survey of 15,000 people in 32 cities. Landmarks in the city include Millennium Park, Navy Pier, the Magnificent Mile, the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Campus, the Willis Tower, Grant Park, the Museum of Science and Industry, Lincoln Park Zoo. Chicago's culture includes the visual arts, film, comedy and music jazz, soul, hip-hop and electronic dance music including house music. Of the area's many colleges and universities, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago are classified as "highest research" doctoral universities. Chicago has professional sports teams in each of the major professional leagues, including two Major League Baseball teams; the name "Chicago" is derived from a French rendering of the indigenous Miami-Illinois word shikaakwa for a wild relative of the onion, known to botanists as Allium tricoccum and known more as ramps.
The first known reference to the site of the current city of Chicago as "Checagou" was by Robert de LaSalle around 1679 in a memoir. Henri Joutel, in his journal of 1688, noted that the eponymous wild "garlic" grew abundantly in the area. According to his diary of late September 1687:...when we arrived at the said place called "Chicagou" which, according to what we were able to learn of it, has taken this name because of the quantity of garlic which grows in the forests in this region. The city has had several nicknames throughout its history such as the Windy City, Chi-Town, Second City, the City of the Big Shoulders, which refers to the city's numerous skyscrapers and high-rises. In the mid-18th century, the area was inhabited by a Native American tribe known as the Potawatomi, who had taken the place of the Miami and Sauk and Fox peoples; the first known non-indigenous permanent settler in Chicago was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. Du Sable arrived in the 1780s, he is known as the "Founder of Chicago".
In 1795, following the Northwest Indian War, an area, to be part of Chicago was turned over to the United States for a military post by native tribes in accordance with the Treaty of Greenville. In 1803, the United States Army built Fort Dearborn, destroyed in 1812 in the Battle of Fort Dearborn and rebuilt; the Ottawa and Potawatomi tribes had ceded additional land to the United States in the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis; the Potawatomi were forcibly removed from their land after the Treaty of Chicago in 1833. On August 12, 1833, the Town of Chicago was organized with a population of about 200. Within seven years it grew to more than 4,000 people. On June 15, 1835, the first public land sales began with Edmund Dick Taylor as U. S. Receiver of Public Monies; the City of Chicago was incorporated on Saturday, March 4, 1837, for several decades was the world's fastest-growing city. As the site of the Chicago Portage, the city became an important transportation hub between the eastern and western United States.
Chicago's first railway and Chicago Union Railroad, the Illi
Lynd Ward
Lynd Kendall Ward was an American artist and storyteller, known for his series of wordless novels using wood engraving, his illustrations for juvenile and adult books. His wordless novels have influenced the development of the graphic novel. Associated with his wood engravings, he worked in watercolor, oil and ink, lithography and mezzotint. Ward was a son of Methodist minister and political organizer Harry F. Ward, his most well known book is Gods' Man. Lynd Kendall Ward was born on June 1905, in Chicago, Illinois, his father, Harry F. Ward, was born in Chiswick, England, in 1873, he named his son after the rural town of Lyndhurst, located in the south coastal county of Hampshire, where he had lived for two years as a teenager prior to his emigration. Ward's mother, Harriet May "Daisy" Kendall Ward, was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1873; the couple met at Northwestern University in Chicago and were married in 1899. Their first child, Gordon Hugh Ward, was born in June 1903, a third, Muriel Ward, was born February 18, 1907.
Soon after birth, Ward developed tuberculosis. Marie in Canada for several months to recover, he recovered, continued to suffer from symptoms of the disease throughout his childhood, as well as from inner ear and mastoid infections. In the hope of improving his health, the family moved to Oak Park, where his father became a pastor at the Euclid Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church. Ward was early drawn to art, decided to become an artist when his first-grade teacher told him that "Ward" spelled backward is "draw". Having skipped a grade, Ward graduated from grammar school a year early in 1918; the family moved to Englewood, New Jersey, Ward entered Englewood High School, where he became art editor of the school newspaper and yearbook, learned linoleum-block printing. In 1922, he graduated with honors in art and debate. Ward studied fine arts at Columbia Teachers College in New York, he edited the Jester of Columbia, to which he crafts how-to articles. His roommate arranged a blind date for Ward and May Yonge McNeer in 1923.
The two married on June 11, 1926, shortly after their graduation, left for Europe for their honeymoon. After four months in eastern Europe, the couple settled in Leipzig in Germany for a year, where Ward studied as a special one-year student at the National Academy of Graphic Arts and Bookmaking, he learned etching from Alois Kolb, lithography from Georg Alexander Mathéy, wood engraving from Hans Alexander "Theodore" Mueller. Ward chanced across a copy of Flemish artist Frans Masereel's wordless novel The Sun, a story told in sixty-three woodcuts without captions. Ward returned to the United States in September 1927, with a number of book publishers in his portfolio. In 1928, his first commissioned work illustrated Dorothy Rowe's The Begging Deer: Stories of Japanese Children with eight brush drawings. May helped with background research for the illustrations, wrote another book of Japanese folk tales, Prince Bantam, with illustrations by Ward. Other work at the time included illustrations for the children's book Little Blacknose by Hildegarde Swift, an illustrated edition of Oscar Wilde's poem "Ballad of Reading Gaol".
In 1929, Ward was inspired to create a wordless novel of his own after he came across German artist Otto Nückel's Destiny. The first American wordless novel, Gods' Man was published by Smith & Cape that October, the week before the Wall Street Crash of 1929, he made five more such works: Madman's Drum, Wild Pilgrimage, Prelude to a Million Years, Song Without Words, Vertigo. In addition to woodcuts, Ward worked in watercolor, oil and ink, lithography and mezzotint. Ward illustrated over a hundred children's books, several of which were collaborations with his wife, May. Starting in 1938, Ward became a frequent illustrator of the Heritage Limited Editions Club's series of classic works, he was well known for the political themes of his artwork addressing labor and class issues. In 1932 he founded Equinox Cooperative Press, he was a member of the Society of Illustrators, the Society of American Graphic Arts, the National Academy of Design. Ward lived with his wife in a home in Cresskill, New Jersey to which they added a studio for their work.
Ward retired to his home in Reston, Virginia, in 1979. He died on June 1985, two days after his 80th birthday, predeceasing his wife. In celebration of the art and life of this American printmaker and illustrator, independent filmmaker Michael Maglaras of 217 Films produced a film titled O Brother Man: The Art and Life of Lynd Ward; the documentary features an interview with the artist’s daughter Robin Ward Savage, as well as more than 150 works from all periods of Ward's career. The 94-minute documentary, culled from over seven hours of film and narrated by Maglaras, premiered at Penn State University Library's, Foster Auditorium, on April 20, 2012, where it was warmly received. Penn State's Special Collections Library has become the repository for much Lynd Ward material, may continue to receive material from Ward family collections, he won a number of awards, including a Library of Congress Award for wood engraving, the Caldecott Medal for The Biggest Bear in 1953, a Rutgers University awa
Society of Illustrators
The Society of Illustrators is a professional society based in New York City. It was founded in 1901 to promote the art of illustration and, since 1959, has held an annual exhibition; the Society of Illustrators was founded on February 1, 1901, by a group of nine artists and one advising businessman. The advising businessman was Henry S. Fleming, a coal dealer who offered his legal staff to the Society in an advisory role and served as the Society of Illustrators Secretary and Treasurer for many years; the nine artists who, with Fleming, founded the Society were Otto Henry Bacher, Frank Vincent DuMond, Henry Hutt, Albert Wenzell, Albert Sterner, Benjamin West Clinedinst, F. C. Yohn, Louis Loeb, Reginald Birch; the mission statement was "to promote the art of illustration and to hold exhibitions from time to time". Women first became part of the organization in 1903, when Elizabeth Shippen Green and Florence Scovel Shinn were named Associate Members. During the World War I years, with Charles Dana Gibson as the acting president, Society members worked through the Committee on Public Information's Division of Pictorial Publicity, creating many original poster designs, including James M. Flagg's US Army iconic recruiting poster of Uncle Sam, as well as advertising of the massive War Bond effort.
Photo journalism was impractical during these years and eight Society members, commissioned Captains in the Engineers, were sent to France to sketch the war. After the war, the Society operated the School for Disabled Soldiers. In 1920, the Society was incorporated, in 1922 women were allowed to become full members; the early history of the Society was documented in 1939 by Norman Price. His hand written notes are held in the Society of Illustrators archives. During the 1920s and 1930s the Society presented the Illustrator's Shows, featuring artists and their models as actors, set designers and painters. Professional talent such as the Cotton Club band and Jimmy Durante performed. Through member and set designer Watson Barrett, the Illustrator's Show of 1925 was held at the Shubert Theatre, the Shuberts purchased the rights to the skits for their Broadway productions of Artists and Models. In 1939, those funds allowed the Society to acquire its present headquarters, at 128 East 63rd Street. Norman Rockwell's Dover Coach became the backdrop for the bar on the fourth floor, donated by Rockwell in honor of the Society's new building.
This painting hangs in the Members Dining Room. In 1948, the Joint Ethics Committee, of which The Society is a member developed the first Code of Fair Practice, which still serves today in addressing concerns of artists and art directors working in the graphic communications field where abuses and misunderstandings regarding usage rights and ownership of works of illustration and other works of art created for a wide range of public media. In 1954, the U. S. Air Force began sending Society of Illustrators members around the world to document its activities; this program continues today. Thousands of paintings have been contributed over the years; the year 1959 saw the Society hold its first Annual Exhibition, juried by Bob Peak, Bradbury Thompson, Stevan Dohanos and others. It opened with 350 original works of art and led to the publication of the first Illustrators Annual. 2001 was the Society's centennial year, a 12-month celebration begun with the U. S. Postal issue, Great American Illustrators.
That year was punctuated with Prevailing Human Spirit. The Society of illustrators continues to maintain an annual of illustration, student scholarship competitions and various awards honoring excellence in the field of illustration; the Society began and maintains outreach programs with The New York City Parks Department, the New York City Board of Education. Anelle Miller has been the director of the Society since 2007; the current President of the Society of Illustrators is Tim O'Brien Notable Past Presidents of the Society Charles Dana Gibson Albert Sterner — founding member George Hand Wright Wallace Morgan Harold von Schmidt Albert Dorne The Museum of American Illustration was established in 1981, under the stewardship of President John Witt. Today the permanent collection includes nearly 2500 works by such artists as Norman Rockwell, Howard Pyle, N. C. Wyeth, James Montgomery Flagg, Bob Peak and Bernie Fuchs; the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art transferred its assets in August 2012 to the Society, which has continued the MoCCA Fest.
The Society of Illustrators inaugurated the Hall of Fame program in 1958, to recognize "distinguished achievement in the art of illustration". The first recipient was Norman Rockwell. Like other recognized artists, he was elected by former Society presidents for his contributions to the field of illustration; every year since 1958, one or more illustrators have been added to the Hall of Fame. In 2001, two additional forms of recognition were added: Dean Cornwell Recognition Award and the Arthur William Brown Achievement Award, which may be awarded annually. In 1965, The Society established The Hamilton King Award, given annually to one society member, is considered to be the most prestigious award in illustration. In 1981, The Society established the Student Scholarship Competition, which has continued annually to the present; the Highest Award presented to a student by the society is the Zankel Scholarship Award, established in 2006 in honor of Arthur Zankel, an advocate for higher education whose bequest made the scholarship possible.
Official website
Carl Barks
Carl Barks was an American cartoonist and painter. He is best known as the creator of Scrooge McDuck, he worked anonymously until late in his career. In 1987, Barks was one of the three inaugural inductees of the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame. Barks worked for the Disney Studio and Western Publishing where he created Duckburg and many of its inhabitants, such as Scrooge McDuck, Gladstone Gander, the Beagle Boys, The Junior Woodchucks, Gyro Gearloose, Cornelius Coot, Flintheart Glomgold, John D. Rockerduck and Magica De Spell. Will Eisner called him "the Hans Christian Andersen of comic books." Barks was born in Oregon, to William Barks and his wife Arminta Johnson. He had an older brother named Clyde, his paternal grandparents were his wife Ruth Shrum. His maternal grandparents were Carl Johnson and his wife Suzanna Massey, but little else is known about his ancestors. Barks was the descendant of Jacob Barks who came to Missouri from North Carolina around 1800, they lived in Marble Hill in Bollinger County.
Jacob Barks' son Isaac was the father of the David Barks noted above. According to Barks' description of his childhood, he was a rather lonely child, his parents owned one square mile of land. The nearest neighbor lived half a mile away, but he was more an acquaintance to Barks' parents than a friend; the closest school was about two miles away and Barks had to walk that distance every day. The rural area had few children and Barks remembered that his school had only about eight or ten students including him, he had high praise for the quality of the education he received in that small school. "Schools were good in those days," he used to say. The lessons lasted from nine o'clock in the morning to four o'clock in the afternoon and he had to return to the farm. There he remembered not having anybody to talk to, as his parents were busy and he had little in common with his brother. In 1908, William Barks moved with his family to Midland, some miles north of Merrill, to be closer to the new railway lines.
He sold his produce to the local slaughterhouses. Nine-year-old Clyde and seven-year-old Carl worked long hours there, but Carl remembered that the crowd which gathered at Midland's market place made a strong impression on him. This was expected. According to Barks, his attention was drawn to the cowboys that frequented the market with their revolvers, strange nicknames for each other and sense of humor. By 1911, they had been successful enough to move to California. There they set up some orchards; the profits were not as high as William expected and they started having financial difficulties. William's anxiety over them was what caused his first nervous breakdown; as soon as William recovered, he made the decision to move back to Merrill. The year was 1913, Barks was 12 years old, he resumed his education at this point and managed to graduate in 1916. 1916 served as a turning point in Barks' life for various reasons. First, his mother, died in this year. Second, his hearing problems, which had appeared earlier, had at the time become severe enough for him to have difficulties listening to his teachers talking.
His hearing would continue to get worse but at that point he had not yet acquired a hearing aid. In life, he couldn't do without one. Third, the closest high school to their farm was five miles away and if he did enroll in it, his bad hearing was to contribute to his learning problems, he had to decide to stop his school education, much to his disappointment. Barks started taking various jobs but had little success in such occupations as a farmer, turner, mule driver and printer. From his jobs he learned, he averred, how eccentric and unpredictable men and machines can be. At the same time he interacted with colleagues, fellow breadwinners who had satirical disposition towards their worst troubles. Barks declared that he was sure that if not for a little humor in their troubled lives, they would go insane, it was an attitude towards life. He would say it was natural for him to satirize the secret yearnings and desires, the pompous style and the disappointments of his characters. According to Barks, this period of his life would influence his best known fictional characters: Walt Disney's Donald Duck and his own Scrooge McDuck.
Donald's drifting from job to job was inspired by Barks' own experiences. So was his usual lack of success, and in those that he was successful this would be temporary, just until a mistake or chance event caused another failure, another disappointment for the frustrated duck. Barks reported that this was another thing he was familiar with. Scrooge's main difference to Donald, according to Barks, was that he too had faced the same difficulties in his past but through intelligence and hard work, he was able to overcome them. Or, as Scrooge himself would say to Huey and Louie: by being "tougher than the toughies and smarter than the smarties." In Barks's stories Scrooge would work to solve his many problems though the stories would point out that his constant efforts seemed futile at the end. In addition, Scrooge was quite similar to his cr
Wally Wood
Wallace Allan Wood was an American comic book writer and independent publisher, best known for his work on EC Comics's Mad and Marvel's Daredevil. He was one of Mad's founding cartoonists in 1952. Although much of his early professional artwork is signed Wallace Wood, he became known as Wally Wood, a name he claimed to dislike. Within the comics community, he was known as Woody, a name he sometimes used as a signature. In addition to Wood's hundreds of comic book pages, he illustrated for books and magazines while working in a variety of other areas – advertising. EC publisher William Gaines once stated, "Wally may have been our most troubled artist... I'm not suggesting any connection, but he may have been our most brilliant", he was the inaugural inductee into the comic book industry's Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1989, was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1992. Wally Wood was born in Menahga, he began reading and drawing comics at an early age, he was influenced by the art styles of Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon, Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates, Hal Foster's Prince Valiant, Will Eisner's The Spirit and Roy Crane's Wash Tubbs.
Recalling his childhood, Wood said that his dream at age six, about finding a magic pencil that could draw anything, foretold his future as an artist. Wood graduated from high school in 1944, signed on with the United States Merchant Marine at the close of World War II and enlisted in the U. S. Army's 11th Airborne Division in 1946, he went from training at Fort Benning, Georgia, to occupied Japan, where he was assigned to the island of Hokkaidō. In 1947, at age 20, Wood only lasted one term. Arriving in New York City with his brother Glenn and mother Alma, after his military discharge in July 1948, Wood found employment at Bickford's restaurant as a busboy. During his time off he carried his thick portfolio of drawings all over midtown Manhattan, visiting every publisher he could find, he attended the Hogarth School of Art but dropped out after one semester. By October, after being rejected by every company he visited, Wood met fellow artist John Severin in the waiting room of a small publisher.
After the two shared their experiences attempting to find work, Severin invited Wood to visit his studio, the Charles William Harvey Studio, where Wood met Charlie Stern, Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder. At this studio Wood learned, he visited Eisner and was hired on the spot. Over the next year, Wood became an assistant to George Wunder, who had taken over the Milton Caniff strip Terry and the Pirates. Wood cited his "first job on my own" as Chief Ob-stacle, a continuing series of strips for a 1949 political newsletter, he entered the comic book field by lettering, as he recalled in 1981: "The first professional job was lettering for Fox romance comics in 1948. This lasted about a year. I started doing backgrounds inking. Most of it was the romance stuff. For complete pages, it was $5 a page... Twice a week, I would ink ten pages in one day". Artists' representative Renaldo Epworth helped Wood land his early comic-book assignments, making it unclear if that connection led to Wood's lettering or to his comics-art debut, the ten-page story "The Tip Off Woman" in the Fox Comics Western Women Outlaws No. 4.
Wood's next known comic-book art did not appear until Fox's My Confession No. 7, at which time he began working continuously on the company's similar My Experience, My Secret Life, My Love Story and My True Love: Thrilling Confession Stories. His first signed work is believed to be in My Confession #8, with the name "Woody" half-hidden on a theater marquee, he penciled and inked two stories in that issue: "I Was Unwanted" and "My Tarnished Reputation". Wood began at EC co-penciling and co-inking with Harry Harrison the story "Too Busy For Love", penciling the lead story, "I Was Just a Playtime Cowgirl", in Saddle Romances No. 11, inked by Harrison. Working from a Manhattan studio at West 64th Street and Columbus Avenue, Wood began to attract attention in 1950 with his science-fiction artwork for EC and Avon Comics, some in collaboration with Joe Orlando. During this period, he drew in a wide variety of subjects and genres, including adventure, romance and horror. Battling Captain Marbles. Wood was instrumental in convincing EC publisher William Gaines to start a line of science fiction comics, Weird Science and Weird Fantasy.
Wood inked several dozen EC science fiction stories. Wood had frequent entries in Two-Fisted Tales and Tales from the Crypt, as well as the EC titles Valor and Aces High. Working over scripts and pencil breakdowns by Jules Feiffer, the 25-year-old Wood drew two months of Will Eisner's Sunday-supplement newspaper comic book The Spirit, on the 1952 story arc "The Spirit in Outer Space". Eisner, Wood recalled, paid him "about $30 a week for lettering and backgrounds on The Spirit. Sometimes he paid $40 when I did the drawings, too". Feiffer, in 2010, recalled Wood's studi
Comic Art Convention
The Comic Art Convention was an American comic book fan convention held annually New York City, New York, over Independence Day weekend from 1968 through 1983, except for 1977, when it was held in Philadelphia, 1978 to 1979, when editions of the convention were held in both New York and Philadelphia. The first large-scale comics convention, one of the largest gatherings of its kind until the Comic-Con International in San Diego, California, it grew into a major trade and fan convention, it was founded by Phil Seuling, a Brooklyn, New York City, who developed the concept of comic-book direct marketing, which led to the rise to the modern comic book store. The New York Comic Art Convention's growth in popularity coincided with the increasing media attention on comics, building since the mid-1960s, feeding off the novel notions of comics being a subject worthy of serious critical study and collectibility. Circa 1961, enterprising fans including Jerry Bails, Shel Dorf, Bernie Bubnis, future Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Roy Thomas began following the pattern of the long-established science fiction fandom by publishing fanzines, corresponding with one another and with comic-book editors, arranging informal and professional, commercial conventions.
Among the first were the 1964 Tri-State Con and that same year's precursor to the Detroit Triple Fan Fair. As Seuling described his convention's genesis, "In 1964, about a hundred people found themselves in a New York City union meeting hall, a large open room with wooden folding chairs, looking around at each other oddly, not knowing what they were there for, a bit sheepish, waiting for whatever was going to take place to begin.... It was the first comics convention hat one-day assembly... grew step by step into an annual tradition in New York and elsewhere." In 1965, the Academy of Comic-Book Fans and Collectors hosted a convention at New York's Broadway Central Hotel, continuing that tradition in 1966 and 1967. The so-called "Academy Cons" featured such industry professionals as Otto Binder, Bill Finger, Gardner Fox, Mort Weisinger, James Warren, Roy Thomas, Gil Kane, Stan Lee, Bill Everett, Carmine Infantino, Julius Schwartz; as Seuling told it, "In 1968, I became involved in my first convention.
The following year began the current series called the Comic Art Convention". Guests of honor at the 1968 show were Stan Lee and Burne HogarthThe 1969 convention, the first official Comic Art Convention, was held Independence Day weekend at the Statler Hilton Hotel in New York City, the guest of honor was Hal Foster. Admittance to the convention cost $3.50 for a three-day ticket, with daily passes at $1.50. Admittance was free with a hotel room rental; the final three years of the 1961-1969 Alley Awards, sponsored by Alter Ego magazine and the Academy of Comic-Book Fans and Collectors, were presented at the Comic Art Convention. After the demise of the Alley years featured the Goethe Awards. In 1973, Seuling persuaded Dr. Fredric Wertham, author of the industry-changing 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, to attend what would be Wertham's only panel with an audience of comics fans; the 1974 show featured a panel on the role of women in comics, with Marie Severin, Flo Steinberg, Jean Thomas, Linda Fite, fan representative Irene Vartanoff.
By 1984, as his comic-book distribution business occupied more time, as other comics conventions, most notably in San Diego and Chicago, became larger, more prominent, more commercial- rather than fan-driven, Seuling segued the Independence Day-centered Comic Art Convention into the smaller Manhattan Con, which took place in mid-June. Seuling died unexpectedly in August 1984, the Comic Art Convention/Manhattan Con died with him; the Comic Art Conventions provided the primary nexus for fans and the New York City-based industry during the Silver Age and the Bronze Age of comic books. As well, many of the Golden Age creators were still alive and in attendance at panels and for interviews, which helped lay the groundwork for the medium's historical scholarship; the reputation of the Convention spread throughout fandom via an annual write-up published in The Buyer's Guide to Comics Fandom by columnist Murray Bishoff. Besides reporting on convention events, Bishoff provided fans around the country with a benchmark market report by surveying attending dealers regarding what was selling and whether prices realized were above or below those quoted in the de facto standard, The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide.
Will Eisner, creator of the Spirit in 1940, credited the 1971 Comic Art Con for his return to comics. In a 1983 interview with Seuling, he said, "I came back into the field because of you. I remember you calling me in New London, where I was sitting there as chairman of the board of Croft Publishing Co. My secretary said, ` he's talking about a comics convention. What is that?' She said,'I didn't know you were a cartoonist, Mr. Eisner."Oh, yes,' I said,'secretly. I came down and was stunned at the existence of the whole world.... That was a world that I had left, I found it exciting stimulating". Eisner elaborated about meeting underground comics creators and publishers, including Denis Kitchen I went down to the conv
Joe Kubert
Joseph "Joe" Kubert was a Polish-born American comic book artist, art teacher, founder of The Kubert School. He is best known for his work on the DC Comics characters Sgt. Rock and Hawkman, he is known for working on his own creations, such as Tor, Son of Sinbad, the Viking Prince, with writer Robin Moore, the comic strip Tales of the Green Beret. Two of Kubert's sons, Andy Kubert and Adam Kubert, themselves became recognized comic book artists, as did many of Kubert's former students, including Stephen R. Bissette, Amanda Conner, Rick Veitch, Eric Shanower, Steve Lieber, Scott Kolins. Kubert was inducted into the Harvey Awards' Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1997, the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1998. Kubert was born September 1926 to a Jewish family in Jezierzany in southeast Poland, he was the son of Jacob Kubert. He emigrated to Brooklyn, New York City, United States, at age two months with his parents and his two-and-a-half-year-old sister Ida. Raised in the East New York neighborhood, the son of a kosher butcher, Kubert started drawing at an early age, encouraged by his parents.
In his introduction to his graphic novel Yossel, Kubert wrote, "I got my first paying job as a cartoonist for comic books when I was eleven-and-a-half or twelve years old. Five dollars a page. In 1938, a lot of money". Another source, utilizing quotes from Kubert, says in 1938, a school friend, related to Louis Silberkleit, a principal of MLJ Studios, urged Kubert to visit the company, where he began an unofficial apprenticeship and at age 12 "was allowed to ink a rush job, the pencils of Bob Montana's Archie". Author David Hajdu, who interviewed Kubert and other comics professionals for a 2008 book, however, that, "Kubert has told varying versions of the story of his introduction to the comics business at age ten, sometimes setting it at the comics shop run by Harry "A" Chesler, sometimes at MLJ. Kubert attended Manhattan's High School of Art. During this time he and classmate Norman Maurer, a future collaborator, would sometimes skip school in order to see publishers. Kubert began honing his craft at the Chesler studio, one of the comic-book packagers that had sprung up in the medium's early days to supply outsourced comics to publishers.
Kubert's first known professional job was penciling and inking the six-page story "Black-Out", starring the character Volton, in Holyoke Publishing's Catman Comics #8. He would continuing drawing the feature for the next three issues, was soon doing similar work for Fox Comics' Blue Beetle. Branching into additional art skills, he began coloring the Quality Comics reprints of future industry legend Will Eisner's The Spirit, a seven-page comics feature that ran as part of a newspaper Sunday supplement. Kubert's first work for DC Comics, where he would spend much of his career and produce some of his most notable art, was penciling and inking the 50-page "Seven Soldiers of Victory" superhero-team story in Leading Comics #8, published by a DC predecessor company, All-American Publications. Throughout the decade, Kubert's art would appear in comics from Fiction House and Harvey Comics, but he otherwise worked for All-American and DC. Kubert's long association with the Hawkman character began with the story "The Painter and the $100,000" in Flash Comics #62.
Kubert drew several Hawkman stories in that title as well as in All Star Comics. He and Irwin Hasen drew the debut of the Injustice Society in All Star Comics #37 in a tale written by Robert Kanigher; the Kanigher/Kubert team created the Thorn in issue Flash Comics #89. In the 1950s, he became managing editor of St. John Publications, where he, his old classmate Norman Maurer, Norman's brother Leonard Maurer produced the first 3-D comic books, starting with Three Dimension Comics #1, featuring Mighty Mouse. According to Kubert, it sold a remarkable 1.2 million copies at 25 cents apiece at a time when comics cost a dime. At St. John, writer Norman Maurer and artist Kubert created the enduring character Tor, a prehistoric-human protagonist who debuted in the comic 1,000,000 Years Ago. Tor went on to star in 3-D Comics #2-3, followed by a titular, traditionally 2-D comic-book series and drawn by Joe Kubert, that premiered with issue #3; the character has since appeared in series from Eclipse Comics, Marvel Comics' Epic imprint, DC Comics through at least the 1990s.
Kubert in the late 1950s unsuccessfully attempted to sell Tor as a newspaper comic strip. The Tor samples consisted of 12 daily strips, reprinted in six pages in Alter Ego vol. 3 #10 and expanded to 16 pages in DC Comics' Tor #1. He contributed work to Avon Periodicals, where he did science-fiction stories for Strange Worlds and other titles. For EC Comics, Kubert drew a few stories for Harvey Kurtzman's Two-Fisted Tales alongside EC stalwarts Wally Wood, Jack Davis, John Severin. Beginning with Our Army at War #32, Kubert began to freelance again for DC Comics, in addition to Lev Gleason Publications and Atlas Comics, the 1950s iteration of Marvel Comics. By the end of the year he was drawing for DC exclusively. DC editor Julius Schwartz assigned Kubert, Robert Kanigher, Carmine Infantino to the company's first attempt at reviving superheroes: an updated version of the Flash that would appear in Showcase #4; the eventual success of the new, science-fiction oriented Flash heralded the wholesale return of s
