Alex Schomberg

[dem bones]

Alex Schomberg (1905-1998).

Alex Schomburg was born in Puerto Rico and moved to New York as a teenager. He started out working as a commercial artist, forming a partnership with his three brothers. He was soon freelancing and finding work in pulp magazines, and he emerged in the late thirties as a talented science fiction pulp cover illustrator, especially skilled at drawing anything mechanical, such as spaceships. In the early forties he began creating covers under editor Stan Lee at Timely Comics for Captain America, The Sub-Mariner, and The Human Torch. His stylized and dynamic covers, with their action-packed tableaux, instantly stood out. Schomburg filled every square inch of his covers with excitement, weapons, explosions, machines, and patriotic flag-waving. Later he mastered the use of the airbrush and, under the pseudonym "Xela" (Alex backwards), created some of the sexiest pinup girls ever drawn for comic book covers. Schomburg created more than five hundred covers during the Golden Age of comics in the forties. In the early fifties he began to create covers and illustrations mainly for science fiction and astrology publications. Stan Lee wrote of Alex Schomburg: "He was to comic books what Norman Rockwell was to the Saturday Evening Post."

— Drew Friedman, Heroes of the Comics (Fantagraphics, 2014)

Early in his career, Schomberg provided line drawings for Mystery Tales, and, almost certainly, Marvel's other short-lived shudder pulp titles. He was also a regular contributor to Standard's crime and horror title, Thrilling Mystery Stories.

Ray Cummings - The Dead Who Walk: (Thrilling Mystery, March 1940).

Richard Tooker - Zombies Never Die: (Thrilling Mystery, Nov. 1937).
Carl Jacobi - The Bells Toll Blood: (Thrilling Mystery, January 1938).

Mindret Lord - Agony in Clay: (Uncanny Tales, April-May. 1939).
Arthur J. Burks - Mates for the Morgue-Master: (Mystery Tales, Dec. 1939).

Earl Howe - The Graveyard Geist: (Strange Stories, April 1940).
David X. Manners - Stepchild of Satan: (Strange Stories, Feb. 1937).

Suspense, April 1944
Fantastic Story, Spring 1952.

[andydecker]

I would want to read both Agony in Clay and Mates for the Morgue-Master. Servant of Satan not so much; this could have easily used for Argosy or Fantastic.

[dem bones]

Apr 15, 2023 18:45:33 GMT andydecker said:

I would want to read both Agony in Clay and Mates for the Morgue-Master. Servant of Satan not so much; this could have easily used for Argosy or Fantastic.

Mates for the Morgue-Master - Burks' bleak variation on The Loved Dead - is reprinted in Ed Hulse's Satan Lives For My love!. The Mindret Lord short features in Revelry in Hell, but that may be difficult to get; Robert Weinberg mentioned that even he didn't have a copy as most copies were destroyed in a warehouse fire. The late John Pelan regarded Lord as "the American Charles Birkin" and intended a volume of collected stories for Dancing Tuatara ("there's just barely enough material"). As mentioned Alex Schomburg was responsible for some, possibly the bulk of the unattributed Marvel shudder-pulp interior artwork.

Carl Jacobi - Death Rides the Plateau: (Thrilling Mystery, May. 1936).

Milton Lowe - Accessories of Death: (Thrilling Mystery, Nov. 1937).
Heydorn Schleh - Cats Have Nine Lives: (Thrilling Mystery, Feb. 1936).




Manly Wade Wellman - His Name on a Bullet: (Strange Stories, April 1940).

[andydecker]

These are uncredited, but chances are good that this is at least one Schomberg.

Mystery Tales, May 1940

Mystery Tales, May 1940

[dem bones]

Apr 16, 2023 13:08:23 GMT andydecker said:

In The Secret History of Marvel Comics there is a chapter about Goodman's foray in this field. Not without merit, just the facts, but you can read the distase between every sentence.

Thanks for putting me on to the Howe and Blake books, Andreas. The Secret History ... in particular has been of great help identify the Marvel shudder pulp artists.

".... Schomberg .... drew a number of crime and science fiction illustrations for titles such as Detective Short Stories and Marvel Science Stories, but it was his work on Uncanny Tales and Mystery Tales that would make the eyes of any Schomburg admirer pop out of their skulls.

"Satanic torture porn" could be used to describe the genre for which Schomburg lent his skills in 1939. Naked women are often portrayed as being whipped (with scars across their bodies), beheaded, and victimized by cults of devil worshippers. "Mortician for Satan's Other-World," "Revelry in Hell," and "The House that Horror Built" only touch upon the madness brought to life by Schomburg's pen. That he signed this material is all the more shocking.

Clearly, however, none of this work had any impact on his ability to move into kiddie comic books only a year later."


— Bell Blake, The Secret History of Marvel Comics (Fantagraphics Books, 2013)

Donald Graham - Chorines For Death's Ballet: (Mystery Tales, May 1939).

Donald Dale (Mary Dale Buckner) - Mortician for Satan's Other-World: (Uncanny Tales, April-May 1939)

Allan K. Echols - The Skull-Brides Beckon: (Mystery Tales, May 1939).

Mindret Lord - The House That Horror Built: (Mystery Tales, May 1939).

[andydecker]

Apr 21, 2023 9:32:45 GMT dem bones said:

Apr 16, 2023 13:08:23 GMT andydecker said:

In The Secret History of Marvel Comics there is a chapter about Goodman's foray in this field. Not without merit, just the facts, but you can read the distase between every sentence.

Thanks for putting me on to the Howe and Blake books, Andreas. The Secret History ... in particular has been of great help identify the Marvel shudder pulp artists.

I must have read the Howe at least a dozen times over the years. I seldom buy contemporary Marvel or DC any longer, and only at bargain prices and digital. But I still can enjoy especially the 70s and 80s, when I began collecting. Even if a lot of what Howe wrote is just one version of the events and hearsay, he gives a good impression how Marvel did function under Lee and later. It reads ever more like a fairy tale when writers like Roy Thomas got his first job at Marvel because he wrote that he would like to meet in person and Stan the Man desparatetly needed an staff writer.