George Tuska is a name familiar to most comic readers of my generation. His work was everywhere for many years. Seriously - everywhere.
Major comics publishers for whom he drew included Archie, Charlton, DC, Fawcett, Fiction House, Fox, Harvey, Hillman, Lev Gleason, Marvel, Quality, St. John, Street & Smith, Tower, Warren, Western and Ziff-Davis. There were lots of others, too.
And he drew newspaper comic strips, including Buck Rogers, Superman, and World's Greatest Super-Heroes. Not to mention (because he was ghost penciling) his work on The Amazing Spider-Man newspaper comic.
He was probably best known to old geezers like myself for his work on titles like Iron Man and The Avengers in the '60s & '70s, then crossing the street to draw books like Justice League in the '70s & '80s. But Tuska's work in comics goes way back much earlier than most of us realized back in those days.
He was working way back in 1939, and got his own feature right away - Zanzibar The Magician. In fact, he made such a solid impression starting out that the publisher began signing his name to other artist's work. That, of course, isn't very helpful to us. But it is a sign of how well regarded his work was from the very beginning.
Zanzibar ran in the first 24 issues of Mystery Men Comics with Tuska's name prominently featured in the splash panel -
Zanzibar's tales were generally quite short - only four pages each. So here's a trio of them to give a look at how his adventures ran -
Y'know - I'm sensing a pattern here...
page art by George Tuska for Mystery Men Comics #s 1-24 (1939-1941)
