Russ Heath

Russ Heath in 2008

Russell "Russ" Heath, Jr. (born September 29, 1926 in New York City , New York - † August 23, 2018 in Long Beach , New York ) was an American comic artist and cartoonist. Heath was best known for his work as a war comic artist and illustrator of the Little Annie Fanny cartoons for Playboy magazine.

Life and work

Heath grew up in New Jersey as an only child in New Jersey . During his high school years he finally began to produce his first work as a freelance comic artist. So he inked some of the stories drawn by Charles Quinlan in the Hammerhead Hawley series that appeared in the Captain Aero Comics series.

At the Second World War, Heath took off in 1945 as a member of the US Air Force in part for which he worked as a cartoonist of the newspaper of his base. Upon his release, Heath, who at the time was receiving a modest Army stipend of $ 20 a week, worked as a freelance artist and lifeguard.

In 1946 he started working for the New York advertising agency Benton & Bowles. In 1947, Heath finally got his first orders as a draftsman at Timely Comics (later Marvel Comics ). His oldest work from this time that could be subsequently identified (the comic books of that time had no information about the artists involved) was a story in the comic book Wild Wester # 4 from November 1948. In addition to Wild Wester , Heath drew stories for Timely for other western series like All Western , Arizona Kid , Black Rider , Western Outlaws , Two-Gun Kid and Reno Browne, Hollywoo's Greates Cowgirl , as well as for superhero series like Captain America Comics and Marvel Boy , science fiction series like Venus , Journey Into Unknown Worlds and Men's Adventures , crime series such as Justice , horror series such as Adventures into Terror , Marvel Tales , Menace , Mystic , Spellbound , Strange Tales , Uncanny Tales and for the humorous series Wild .

In the 1950s, war comics gradually emerged as Heath's main field of activity: for EC Comics, he first drew a few issues of the Frontline Comics series , before starting his decades-long work on the DC Comics series Our Army at War (# 23) and in June 1954 Star Spangled War Stories (# 22) began. Another war comic series that Heath worked on, as on the two aforementioned, until the 1980s was the series GI Combat , for which he created the series The Haunted Tank together with his main artistic partner, the author Robert Kanigher . Also with Kanigher, Heath developed the Sea Devils adventure series , which tells the adventures of a group of daring deep-sea divers.

Heath and Lichtenstein's embarrassment

A drawing by Heath for the comic book All American Men of War # 89 from February 1962, showing an exploding airplane, became the basis of Roy Lichtenstein's oil painting Blam from the same year.

Awards

In 1997, Heath received the Inkpot Award for life's work.