Sam Kweskin drew roughly 25 stories that appeared during the cover dates of 1953. His style possessed a rough-hewn earthiness that suited the pre-code material extremely well. His horror stories (ADVENTURES INTO TERROR, ASTONISHING, MARVEL TALES, MYSTIC, UNCANNY TALES) were dark and foreboding, his war stories (BATTLE, BATTLE ACTION, BATTLEFRONT, WAR COMICS) full of muddy trenches and gritty struggles, and his westerns (WILD WESTERN) were dusty and somber.
In
"He Lurks In The Shadows" (UNCANNY TALES #6,
Mar/53) Kweskin depicts the dark, eerie alleys
where a mugger plys his trade, repeatedly killing and robbing victims to get
money to keep his wife in expensive gifts, only to unexpectantly fall as a robbery
victim to his own wife, trying to rob to buy gifts for "him". The panels and
pacing are dark and expressive, oozing with pre-code ambiance. Likewise in "The Brain" (ASTONISHING #22, Feb/53). The world's greatest intellect comes up with a solution to pay off his large personal debts. Upon realizing he is dying, he pre-sells his brain to science (to be studied after he dies), selling it to 10 different parties and getting them to pay him in advance! Thus all his debts were paid off before he died.
As 1953
progressed, Sam illustrated World War ll stories, revolutionary war period pieces
like "Ticonderoga" (WAR COMICS #20, July/53),
and even returned to biblical themes with "Noah's Ark" in BIBLE
TALES FOR YOUNG FOLKS #1 (Aug/53).Sam's work also graced the cover of one Atlas' most notorious pre-code horror titles, ADVENTURES INTO TERROR #17 (Mar/53). This is considered a coup due mostly to the fact that Stan Lee had his personal small cache of cover artists who rotated through 90% of all the horror cover duties, namely Bill Everett, Joe Maneely, Russ Heath, Sol Brodsky and Carl Burgos. Sam's cover is beautifully gruesome, depicting a bound young woman being dumped into an open grave and menaced by the approaching hands of skeletal corpses. Horror in all it's pre-code splendor!
By far though,
one of Sam's best stories dealt with the theme of a Jewish concentration camp
and a brutal Nazi camp commander. In "The Butcher of Wulfhausen" (KENT
BLAKE OF THE SECRET SERVICE #14, July/53), a brutal, sadistic death camp
commander escapes the war and by 1952 is trying to sneak behind the Iron Curtain.
He's pursued by an American agent, ultimately chased right over the site of
his old, now long gone death camp and is pulled screaming into a mass grave
pit by the scores of corpses of his old victims. A powerful and eerie story
perfectly rendered in an atmosphere of dread. This tale mirrors the classic
Twilight Zone episode "Deaths- Head Revisted" which would air in 1961,
without the EC-like rotting corpses, of course.Sam eventually moved back to Chicago and Stan Lee continued to mail scripts to him for a while but this eventually petered out. He entered the commercial art world left comics altogether for almost 20 years, except for one anomaly. In 1957 a 3-page light fantasy story "The Hidden Hex" appeared in WORLD OF FANTASY #7 (May/57). This single "out of the blue" story pretty much capped off the Timely/Atlas career of Sam Kweskin. Sam would return to comics for a short while in the early 1970's, following Bill Everett on SUB- MARINER as well as pencilling a bunch of mystery/horror stories for Marvel's renewed horror line.
For about one year, Sam Kweskin was a vital cog in the pre-code Timely/Atlas line. I hope this has shed some much needed light on another of the unsung heroes of the Timely/Atlas era.
