| George Tuska | |
|---|---|
 Tuska in the 1960s | |
| Born | (1916-04-26)April 26, 1916 Hartford, Connecticut, U.S. |
| Died | October 16, 2009(2009-10-16) (aged 93) |
| Area(s) | Penciller, Inker |
| Pseudonym | Carl Larson |
Notable works | Crime Does Not Pay Fawcett'sCaptain Marvel Iron Man The World's Greatest Superheroes comic strip |
| Awards | Inkpot Award, 1997 |
George Tuska (/ˈtʌskə/; April 26, 1916 – October 16, 2009),[1][2] who early in his career used a variety ofpen names includingCarl Larson, was an Americancomic book and newspapercomic stripartist best known for his 1940s work on variousCaptain Marvel titles and thecrime fiction seriesCrime Does Not Pay and for his 1960s work illustratingIron Man and otherMarvel Comics characters. He also drew theDC Comics newspapercomic stripThe World's Greatest Superheroes from 1978–1982.
George Tuska was born inHartford, Connecticut, the youngest of three children ofRussian immigrants Harry and Anna Onisko Tuska, who had met in New York City.[3] George's siblings Peter, the eldest, and Mary, the middle child, were born in New York City. Years later, Mary died while giving birth to her second child, who was stillborn.[4] Harry, a foreman at a Hartford auto-tire company, died when George was 14.[3] Anna then opened a restaurant inPaterson, New Jersey, where she had relatives, and later remarried.[3] At 17, Tuska moved to New York City, rooming with his cousin Annie, and a year later began attending theNational Academy of Design.[5] His artistic influences included illustratorsHarold von Schmidt,Dean Cornwell, andThomas Lovell, andcomic strip artistsLou Fine,Hal Foster, andAlex Raymond.[5] At some early point, he took his first job in art, designing women'scostume jewelry.[5]
Tuska then began working forcomic book packagerEisner & Iger, one of a handful of companies at the time that supplied comics on demand for publishers entering the newmedium. His first known published comic-book work appeared inFox Comics'Mystery Men Comics #1 andWonderworld Comics #4, bothcover-dated August 1939. Tuska in the mid-2000s recalled:
I went to art school at the same I was doing costume jewelry design. I put in an application with a professional agency in New York City. I told them I could do cartooning, drawing. A week later, I got a call from Eisner-Iger, asking me to submit some samples. ... [Eisner] said, 'That's pretty good, but we don't do that [cartoon] stuff'. He showed me a comic book and said, 'This is what we want'. ... I went home and made a page — a whole story in one page. When I brought it back, he bought it for $5. He said, 'We'd like to have you work for us'. That's how I got started. ... I gave up school. ... I made $10 per week.[6]
At Eisner & Iger, Tuska said in 2001, "I worked alongsideBob Powell,Lou Fine, andMike Sekowsky". His studio colleagues later grew to include artistsCharles Sultan,John Celardo, andNick Cardy, and writerToni Blum. Writer-artist and company co-founderWill Eisner recalled of the period, "It was a friendly shop, and I guess I was the same age as the youngest guys there. We all got along. The only ones who ever got into a hassle were George Tuska andBob Powell. Powell was kind of a wiseguy and made remarks about other people in the shop. One day, George had enough of it, got up, and punched out Bob Powell".[7] The otherwise mild-mannered Tuska, thinking comic books "would last two or three years — a fad",[8] later left to seek non-comics work. After two weeks, however, he came across colleagues Sultan andDave Glaser, on their way to meet with comics packagerHarry "A" Chesler.[8][9] Tuska, invited along, joined Chesler's studio, working there in 1939 and 1940, earning $22 a week, increased to $42 a week within six months.[10] Alongside colleagues that included Sultan,Ruben Moreira,Mac Raboy, andRalph Astarita,[9] Tuska helped to supply content for suchFawcett Comics publications asCaptain Marvel Adventures.[9] Later, when Eisner-Iger clientFiction House formed its own bullpen to produce work on staff, Tuska left Chesler to join Cardy,Jim Mooney,Graham Ingels and other artists there.[11]
Tuska produced a prodigious amount of work that included, for Fiction House, theSouth Sea adventure feature "Shark Brodie" (under thepen nameGeorge Aksut)[12] and the investigative feature "Hooks Devlin", both forFight Comics; the rich-vigilante feature "Glory Forbes" inRanger Comics; and "Jane Martin" inWings Comics.[13] Before and during his six years at Fiction House, Tuska freelanced such features as theNorth Atlantic seafaring adventure "Spike Marlin" (asCarl Larson)[14] inHarvey Comics'Speed Comics; "Wing Turner" (asFloyd Kelly)[15] forFox Comics'Mystery Men Comics; "Archie O'Toole" (asBud Thomas)[16] inQuality Comics'Smash Comics and "Cosmic Carson" (asMichael Griffith)[17] in Fox'sScience Comics.
At some point, Tuska again worked forWill Eisner, now split fromJerry Iger, with a group of artists includingAlex Kotzky andTex Blaisdell. "While with Eisner, I penciled someSpirit andUncle Sam stories".[9] (Tuska's first Uncle Sam work was the cover and virtually every story inUncle Sam Quarterly #3, cover-dated Summer 1942.) Independently, he was assigned by Fawcett art directorAl Allard to draw "a few more Captain Marvel stories. Allard had asked me to draw as close as possible to the way Captain Marvel had first appeared inWhiz Comics. ... After those freelance jobs, I never worked for Fawcett again".[9] Tuska's earliest Captain Marvel work appeared inCaptain Marvel Adventures #2-4 (Summer 1941, Fall 1941, and the oddly dated Oct. 31, 1941).
Drafted into theU.S. Army circa 1942, Tuska was stationed at the100th Division atFort Jackson inColumbia, South Carolina where he worked in headquarters drawing artillery.[18] He was honorably discharged as aprivate first class after a year for reasons the artist did not specify.[18] Returning home, he took up again with Fiction House, drawing a host of stories featuring Reef Ryan, Rip Carson, Lady Satan, theWestern heroGolden Arrow, and Camilla, Queen of the Jungle.[13]
Following the huge popularity ofsuperheroes during theWorld War II years, those characters' appeal began to dwindle in the post-war era.[19] Comic-book publishers, casting about for new subjects and genres, found a hit incrime fiction, the most prominent comic of which wasLev Gleason Publications'Crime Does Not Pay.[20] Tuska would soon make a name for himself as one of the genre's top comics artists.[21] After starting with short backup features and spot illustrations for text stories, Tuska was drawing the lead stories and more byCrime Does Not Pay #50 (March 1947).[13]
Tuska's first work for the futureMarvel Comics came in 1949, when Marvel's predecessor company,Timely Comics, was transitioning to its 1950s iteration,Atlas Comics. His first confirmed credit is the seven-page story"Justice Has a Heart" inCasey - Crime Photographer # 1 (Aug. 1949).[22] He quickly went on to draw in an abundance of genres for Atlas, includingcrime fiction (in titles includingCrime Can't Win,Crime Exposed,Private Eye,Justice,Amazing Detective Cases, andAll True Crime Cases Comics);military fiction (Men in Action,War Combat,Man Comics,Battlefield, andBattle);horror (Adventures into Weird Worlds,Adventures into Terror,Mystic,Menace, andStrange Tales); and, particularly,Westerns (Black Rider,Gunsmoke Western,Kid Colt, Outlaw,Red Warrior,Texas Kid,Two-Gun Kid,Western Outlaws & Sheriffs,Wild Western, and many others) through 1957, while also occasionally contributing toLev Gleason andSt. John Publications.[13]
Simultaneously at first, from 1954 to 1959, Tuska took over as writer-artist for the failing adventure comic stripScorchy Smith,[9] supplying "eye-catching drawings and interesting plots, but it was too late".[23] The strip would end in 1961.[23] Tuska by then had moved on to the long-runningscience-fiction comic stripBuck Rogers, on which he was the final artist, drawing both the daily and Sunday strip from April 1959 to 1965, and the daily only from then through 1967, when both the daily and the Sunday were canceled.[24]
Near the cancellation of the dailyBuck Rogers strip, Tuska again found a freelance home at what was by nowMarvel Comics, then in the full breadth of what historians and fans call theSilver Age of Comic Books. "I called [editor-in-chief]Stan [Lee] and he said, 'Come on up', Tuska recalled in the mid-2000s. His first Marvel story, a "Tales of the Watcher" feature inTales of Suspense #58 (Nov. 1964), included a special introduction by Lee, hailing the return of theGolden Age great.
Tuska became a Marvel mainstay,penciling and occasionallyinking other artists on series as diverse asGhost Rider,Sub-Mariner, andThe X-Men. His signature series becameIron Man, on which he enjoyed a nearly 10-year, sometimes briefly interrupted, run from issue #5 (Sept. 1968) to #106 (Jan. 1978).[25] He and writerArchie Goodwin created theController as an antagonist inIron Man #12 (April 1969).[26]
Comics historianLes Daniels noted that when Goodwin, Tuska and inkerBilly Graham launchedLuke Cage, Hero for Hire in 1972, "it was the first Marvel comic to take its title from a black character."[27]Shanna the She-Devil was created byCarole Seuling,Steve Gerber, and Tuska in the eponymous first issue of that character's own series.[28] He was one of the artists on thelicensed movie tie-in seriesPlanet of the Apes.[29] Due to Marvel not having thelikeness rights forCharlton Heston, the star of the film, one of the lawyers at20th Century Fox insisted on changes to Tuska's art. Editor Roy Thomas believed that Tuska "just made a handsome looking guy, but it didn't look like Heston ... you can't argue. If somebody says it looks like Charlton Heston and they're worried he's gonna sue, you can't say 'no' because they just weren't going to give the approval."[30]
The A.V. Club insert ofThe Onion wrote, shortly before Tuska's death in 2009, that,
Tuska was perfectly competent, and his art for titles likeIron Man andThe Incredible Hulk [sic][31] is decent, though unspectacular. But his drawing was so quickly assayed, and so essentially flavorless, that he became the King of the Fill-In Issue, hopping in to provide bland, forgettable work whenever someone else blew a deadline. He thus played an inadvertent part in setting up [Marvel and DC Comics]' creed of speed over quality, and helped establish the Marvel house style, which nurtured some young artists, but acted as an artistic straitjacket for others.[32]
That assessment of Tuska's Marvel work is not widely shared.John Romita Sr., Marvel's de facto and later officialart director during this period, found Tuska "so versatile. He could do everything. When Stan knew that a guy could do anything, he used him in every possible, conceivable way. George was a helluva artist and very versatile and very fast. ... He was in demand".[33] Comics writer and Tuska collaboratorTony Isabella wrote, "I would love to see aBest of George Tuska collection which included his crime, mystery, romance, war, and western stories. He brought as much excitement and talent to those genres as he did to superhero comics".[34] Comics journalist and historianTom Spurgeon wrote that,
... his layouts were certainly more imaginative than the standard at the time, and the way in which characters like Luke Cage held a lot of their strength in their shoulders and punched from their legs up through their torsos betrayed his knowledge of strength and fitness. His signature flourish may have been characters in arrested motion, coiled in preparation for violence like so many pulp heroes of an earlier generation, legs splayed in the form of a near-base ready for what might come next. ... Tuska cemented his reputation as one of the more iconic superhero artists of [the 1970s] — two full generations after entering comics.[35]
Later, forDC Comics, Tuska drew characters includingSuperman,Superboy, andChallengers of the Unknown.[13] He had a four-year run drawingThe World's Greatest Superheroes comic strip from 1978–1982, inked byVince Colletta.[36] By this time, his health had become a handicap;Jim Shooter, who scripted an issue ofDaredevil penciled by Tuska in 1977, recalled that, "George Tuska was at the end of his brilliant career, he was mostly deaf, communication was difficult, and though he showed occasional flashes of the chops that made him a big name artist in his day, I don't think his work onDaredevil was anywhere near his best."[37] Tuska drew DC'sMasters of the Universe limited series in 1982.[38]
Retired from active comics work as of the 2000s, Tuska late in life moved fromHicksville, New York, onLong Island,[39] toManchester Township, New Jersey, with his wife Dorothy ("Dot"), where he did commissioned art.[9] The couple had three children, Barbara, Kathy and Robert.[2] Tuska died in 2009 "near the stroke of midnight between October 15 and October 16,"[35] officially on the latter date.[1][2] His last published comic-book art was one of four variant covers forDynamite Entertainment'sMasquerade #2 (March 2009).[40]
Tuska was a 1997 recipient of the industry'sInkpot Award.[41]
Comics work includes:
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)His most celebrated achievement was a decade-plus run onIron Man ...
| Preceded by | Iron Man artist 1968–1978 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by n/a | Hero for Hire artist 1972–1973 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | The Avengers artist 1975 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Justice League of America artist 1985 | Succeeded by |
