Jim Mooney (comic artist)

James Noel "Jim" Mooney (born August 13, 1919 - March 30, 2008 in Port Salerno , Florida ) was an American comic artist .

Live and act

Mooney grew up in Los Angeles , California. After attending school, Mooney moved to New York City in 1940, where he began working as a full-time comic artist. His first published work - a story about the character "The Moth" - appeared in the April 1940 comic book Mystery Men Comics # 9.

For the publishing house Fiction House he was responsible for the series "Camilla" and "Suicide Smith" as a draftsman before he switched to Timely Comics, the predecessor of Marvel Comics , as a freelance artist . Until 1946/1947 he was mainly occupied with the visualization of so-called funny animal series. H. Rows in the center of which were humanized animals who had fun adventures. For example, he drew for the series Perky Penguin and Booby Bear . There was also the Treasure Chest series distributed in Catholic schools .

In 1946 Mooney began to work for the publisher National Comics (later DC Comics ), for which he was to work for a total of twenty-two years, until 1968. After initially looking after the series Batman for a few years as the successor to Dick Sprang . Then he took over the drawing job for a large number of DC series of various genres. He was responsible for the superhero series Superboy , drew the science fiction Feauter "Tommy Tomorrow," which in the series Action Comics and World's Finest Comics was published, as well as the fantasy series "Dial H for Hero" in House of Mystery was published . His best-known works from these years, however, he presented for the adventures published in the Action Comics about the heroine Supergirl , which he shot from 1959 to 1968.

For Atlas Comics, Mooney designed several editions of the Lorna the Jungle Queen series in parallel to his work for DC from 1953 to 1954 . As a sideline, he also ran an antiquarian bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles during these years .

In 1968 Mooney returned to New York, where he began drawing Marvel Comics for DC's competitor through Stan Lee 's agency . There, from 1968 to 1970, he first inked John Romita's pencil drawings for the Spider-Man series (# 65 and 67-88). He then worked, again as a tusker, on the series The Mighty Thor , for which he revised drawings by John Buscema .

In the following decades Mooney was mainly active for the various Spider-Man series ( Amazing Spider-Man , Spectacular Spider-Man , Spider-Man ) as well as for the Marvel Team-Up series. There was also work for series such as Man-Thing , Omega the Unknown and for coloring books in the Marve Comics program. For DC he illustrated some Superboy stories in the early 1980s while he worked for Millennium Publications on the series The Mummy , for Awesome Entertainment on Lady Supreme and for Adventure Publications on Star Rangers (1987–1988).

In 1975 Mooney moved to Florida, where he worked as an illustrator until the late 1980s and then lived until his death in March 2008, three years after the death of his wife Anne Mooney.