| Sam Kweskin | |
|---|---|
 U.S. Army photo, taken July 1944 | |
| Born | Irving Sam Kweskin February 24, 1924 Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Died | June 23, 2005 (aged 81) |
| Nationality | American |
| Area(s) | Artist |
| Pseudonym(s) | Irv Wesley |
Irving Samuel Kweskin [1] (February 24, 1924—June 23, 2005), [2] who sometimes worked under the name Irv Wesley, [1] was an American advertising and comic-book artist. He was best known for his work at Marvel Comics.
Born on February 24, 1924 in Chicago, Illinois, [1] and raised there with a sister, Sally, [3] and a father who died when Kweskin was 11, Kweskin learned to draw by copying Sunday newspaper comics, particularly those of Hal Foster, on sheets of grocery wrapping paper. [4] Per differing accounts, he either won a scholarship at 16 to the Studio School of Art, and the following summer enrolled in a course at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, [1] or before his senior year of high school won a scholarship to a summer course at the Academy. [4] By both accounts one classmate was the future celebrated military cartoonist Bill Mauldin. [1] [4] At 16, through a neighbor who worked with Foster's brother, Kweskin visited Foster at the respected writer-illustrator's Evanston, Illinois, attic studio and subsequently "wrote a story about my visit for my high school newspaper." [1] After high school, Kweskin worked as a night-shift copyboy for Chicago Tribune newspaper, [1] [4] and then entered the U.S. Army. [1]
Private Kweskin did military service February 1943 to December 1945, during World War II, joining the 83rd Chemical Mortar Battalion in September 1944 as a military artist, contributing to the military periodicals Muzzleblasts and Rounds Away. [5] and said he was among the Allied troops who helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp. [6] After his discharge, he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in early 1949. [1] He worked for a year with former Walt Disney Pictures animator Sam Singer, doing two children's cartoon series for the local ABC-TV station.[ citation needed ] Kweskin then left to develop his own local children's-TV programs.[ citation needed ]
He later drew comic-book bible stories for David C. Cook Publishing in Elgin, Illinois.[ citation needed ] A friend put Kweskin in touch with New York City's Atlas Comics, the 1950s precursor of Marvel Comics, and Kweskin "flew into NYC in August or September 1952" [1] to meet with Atlas editor-in-chief Stan Lee. Kweskin began freelancing for Atlas from Chicago before eventually moving with his family to New York City.[ citation needed ]
Kweskin's earliest confirmed credits include penciling and self-inking stories in five Atlas comics cover-dated February 1953: The horror/mystery books Strange Tales #15, Adventures Into Terror #16, Astonishing #22 and Spellbound #12, and the war comic Battlefront #9. He continued drawing stories for such Atlas horror anthologies as Journey into Mystery , Marvel Tales , and Uncanny Tales , Western titles including Kid Colt, Outlaw and Wild Western , and even Bible Tales for Young Folk. [7]
He recalled of his Atlas stint that he was:
moved by the fact that [editor-in-chief] Stan [Lee] was never stand-offish, and always found time to sit in his office with an artist to just talk. He immediately gave me another story, which I completed to his satisfaction. Eventually, I had to return to Chicago; after the first NY trip I took two more excursions that Fall/Winter to make certain that I might decide to move East — in fact, Stan had been sending me scripts and said that, '[O]f course, you could do more work if you lived here.' My wife was especially thrilled with New York — I had never been there except on a soldier's pass for a day or so — and so I moved first to NYC, found an apartment, and was followed by my wife and two small children. [1]
After about a year, during a downturn in the comics industry, Kweskin returned to commercial illustration, saying in letters to two comics historians that he "went to work as a studio artist for a while" and then became an art director for an industrial film production company and later at "an agency doing mostly Latin American advertising," followed by a similar position at a different agency working on television commercials. He said he continued to do freelance work including medical illustrations for Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy , "and, in a couple of years, maintained a small agency of my own." [1]
In 1957, he freelanced briefly again for Atlas on science fiction / fantasy and war comics. [7]
In the early 1970s, Kweskin briefly returned to freelancing for what was now formally Marvel Comics. He both wrote and penciled a six-page horror tale, "Revenge from the Rhine", in Journey into Mystery vol. 2, #3 (Feb. 1973), and then succeeded Sub-Mariner creator Bill Everett on that character's comic-book title following Everett's death; Kweskin and Everett together penciled issue #58 (Feb. 1973), with Everett inking and Kweskin variously penciled or laid out #59-60 and 62-63. [7] Kweskin also filled in for Gene Colan and penciled Daredevil #99 (May 1973).
As Kweskin wrote in a 2002 e-mail excerpted in an article by comics historian Ken Quattro:
I did have lunch with Bill [Everett] one day after he had had a heart attack somewhat earlier that month, and [Marvel publisher] Stan Lee suggested we get together for me to get the 'feel' of Bill's approach to a strip that he had developed. And so I began doing Sub-Mariner. ... Whether [editor-in-chief] Roy Thomas or Stan or I decided it was not in the cards to continue it after a few issues, I can't remember, since at the time I was also president of my own small ad/art agency and responsible to several employees. Much of my time there had to be spent doing ad layouts and — on occasion — writing copy". [1]
Afterward he spent three years as an art director at Ziff-Davis magazines, and then freelanced for 10 years as an ad-agency storyboard artist. [1] Kweskin also painted and sketched, including several works depicting Manhattan's Upper West Side, where he lived for approximately 40 years [8] before moving to Boca Raton, Florida, in 1993. He exhibited his art work venues including New York City's Grand Central Galleries, the Salmagundi Club, and the Society of Illustrators. [1] His latter-life freelance work included a cover for the Veterans of Foreign Wars magazine, and painted a commissioned canvas for a military museum in Louisiana. [1]
Kweskin at the end of his life was no longer with wife Corinne. He had three children: son Joel and daughters Jean and Barbara, the latter of whom predeceased him. The Barbara Kweskin Scholarship Fund at the Art Institute of Chicago is named for her. [3]
I was involved in my small agency, and ... I thought it best not to have possible clients (who looked down on comic magazines) associate my name with the books; I used Irv Wesley because Irving is my actual first name, and Wesley is the 'Anglicization' of our otherwise Lithuanian name that some earlier family settlers used in their business.
I was at Dachau as a soldier – one of our battalion companies entered Dachau to free its inhabitants...
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