Ken Bald
Kenneth Bruce Bald (b. August 1, 1920) is an American illustrator and comic book artist best known for the Judd Saxon, Dr. Kildare, and Dark Shadows newspaper comic strips. Due to contractual obligations, he is credited as "K. Bruce" on the Dark Shadows strip.
Biography
Early career
Ken Bald's comics work began in the 1940s period fans and historians call the Golden Age of Comic Books. His earliest confirmed credit is penciling the 16-page Captain America story "Ali Baba and His Forty Nazis" in Captain America Comics #32 (Nov. 1943), published by Marvel Comics precursor Timely Comics. Historians have tentatively identified Bald as both penciler and inker of the earlier, 14-page Bulletman story "The Terror of the Iceberg" in Fawcett Comics' Master Comics #26 (May 1942).
Bald drew stories of such Timely superheroes as Captain America, the Sub-Mariner, the Blonde Phantom, the Destroyer, and Miss America variously through comics cover-dated July 1949. He both wrote and drew a number of Millie the Model humor stories in the comics Georgie and Patsy Walker, and at least drew the teen-humor character Cindy in Georgie and Judy Comics and Junior Miss.
Bald penciled the first appearance of the Sub-Mariner spin-off character Namora, in "The Coming of Namora" in Marvel Mystery Comics #82 (May 1947), but it is unclear if he helped create the character; the cover, which was sometimes created first, featured Namora draw by Bob Powell. Similarly, Bald drew Timely's single issue of The Witness (Sept. 1948), starring a character co-created by writer-editor Stan Lee, but the cover for which was drawn by Charles Nicholas. Bald, with an unidentified writer, co-created Timely the superhero Sun Girl, who starred in a three-issue series cover-dated August to December 1948.
Other comic-book works includes the character Crime Smasher in Fawcett's Whiz Comics in the 1940s, and many anthological horror/suspense stories in American Comics Group's Adventures into the Unknown, The Clutching Hand, Forbidden Worlds and Out of the Night from 1949 through late 1954. Also for ACG, he co-created the adventure feature Time Travelers in Operation: Peril #1 (Nov. 1950)
References
Dark Shadows: The Comic Strip Book, by Kenneth Bruce Bald (illustrator), Pomegranate Press, 1996. ISBN 0938817396