Artists of the Hawks

Dennis Neville (19-?)

An early assistant artist for Joe Shuster on Superman in the Golden Age, Dennis Neville drew the first two stories of Hawkman in Flash Comics. He also did a lot of work on Shuster and Jerry Siegal's other classic creation, Slam Bradley, which preceded Batman by about two years in Detective Comics. While he wasn't one of the biggest names in comics in those early days, he certainly did work on plenty of important characters and titles.

Sheldon Mayer (1917-1991)

Mayer first began working in comics when in his teens, doing various small jobs in cartooning, and became an assistant to Maxwell C. Gaines (father of Bill Gaines, who succeeded him in his jobs after his father's death and was the EIC and chairman of MAD magazine in his time too), going to work for him in 1935 and helped him to work on creating the pamphlet format for comic books we know today.

Whenever there was space available in Popular Comics or even The Funnies, he'd try to come up with something of his own to fill it. Later, when promoted to editor at DC Comics, he was instrumental in helping Gardner Fox to launch Flash and Hawkman in Flash Comics in 1940, and even Green Lantern in All-American Comics and the Justice Society of America in All-Star Comics that same year.

Sheldon Moldoff (1920-?)

Sheldon Moldoff was born in New York City in 1920. He learned how to draw with chalk for starters, using the sidewalks of Manhattan as his first canvas. At the age of seventeen he sold his first cartoon and soon afterward he became first assistant to Bob Kane on the Batman series, working with Kane on this series on and off for thirty years.

In 1940, Moldoff drew both the Black Pirate and Hawkman for DC Comics. From about 1939 he was one of DC's most prolific cover artists, illustrating many covers, including the cover to All American Comics #16, the first appearance of Green Lantern. His style at the time was very illustrative. In 1953 he became one of the lead artists on Batman with Dick Sprang and Win Mortimer, which he drew for the next 14 years.

Moldoff left comics in 1967, during the big DC clean-out, and several other golden age artists were also let go. From there he went into film production, working on numerous animated projects, one of which was storyboarding the Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse cartoon series as well as hundreds of others. He also produced comic books for chain restaurants companies such as Burger King and Red Lobster.

Joe Kubert (1926-)

Joe Kubert began working in comics and artistry at age eleven, as an apprentice for the production company of Harry Chesler. He has worked in the field ever since, and his more than sixty year history in the medium includes producing memorable stories of such characters as Hawkman, Tarzan, Enemy Ace, Batman, The Flash, and Sgt. Rock for DC Comics. He also edited and illustrated Sgt. Rock, which spun out of Our Army at War. Sgt. Rock was published for 30 years until the early 1990's.

In 1952, he was a principle in the creation of the first 3-D comic book (for Mighty Mouse). During the 1960's, he illustrated Robin Moore's novel, Tales of the Green Beret, for the Chicago-Tribune New York News Syndicate. Some of the newspapers that it appeared in were the NY Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and so on. He has also been responsible for Winnie Winkle (for Tribune Media Services) and Big Ben Bolt (for King Features Syndicate). Joe was an editor for DC Comics for a period of 25 years.

Kubert has written and illustrated four graphic novels: Tor, Abraham Stone, Fax from Sarajevo, and Yossel: April 19, 1943. He has illustrated Sgt. Rock: Between Hell and a Hard Place, the latter which was written by Brian Azzarello.

There will be more to come in updates for this section soon, so please stay tuned.