Artist Unknown and Iger
It was either “artist unknown” or “Iger Shop,” which essentially means the same shit. Horror comics from the 1950s never gave credit to the creators, unless you spot a rare signature by the artist somewhere on the first page. But since those days, comic book archivists and historians have managed to identify creators for some of the work. It follows that we know much of the work of Bob Powell because of documents and witness accounts, but also because his drawing style was so evocative. His work got so popular, that copycats started drawing those muscular faces with the same panache that was such an imprint of Powell’s work. In a manner of thinking, some of these “fakes” were so good, who knows if all of Powell’s alleged work were his or not?
But Powell was an exception. The industry didn’t have many of these. The crap was churned out so that it met with the demand. Comic books were big money taken from little kids. Not everyone that worked them was a first-rate artist. We horror comic aficionados revere Bob Powell, Lee Elias, and Jack Cole today, but they were virtual nobodies in their day. They would hide the fact they worked in comic books. If asked, they would claim they were commercial artists.
Because of our new interest, publishers are collecting these old works in nicely-made books for us to enjoy. Which takes me back to this one book that had so many unknown artists, I was like, “What the hell!” At the start of every story, I would level my eyes to the bottom of the page to see who did it, and it would say “Artist unknown.” About half the stories were “artist unknown.” And many of the others said “Iger Shop.” And they practically meant the same thing — but not quite.
If it declared the artist as unknown, it meant they couldn’t even properly attribute it to anyone. But Iger Shop was a mismatch. It pointed to no style because the system behind Iger Shop took away any inkling of originality.
The Iger Shop was a business run like a sweat shop. It had comic book artists lined up in rows of drawing boards producing the content for comic book publishers, doing it assembly line fashion. If you were an artist working for Iger, you were hired to draw the one thing you were good at: just close up faces of beautiful women, or spooky backgrounds on countrysides, or fast cars, or figures fighting each other, or monsters. From the directions of an editor/scripter, they would get the right artist for the panel needed. Each page was a Frankenstein monster that came from pieces of different artists patched together to make this grotesque thing. Maybe the pages were laid out by one artist designated to lay out pages before it was given to each respective artist to fulfill his duty.
But if you were good at drawing a mangled head or a living corpse, you were used in the specific panels that needed them, even if you were good at other things. This hodgepodge of art chores was put together in the end with perhaps a single inker who gave it a varnish of consistency. It might not hold it all together, but it was all that a system like this could ever hope for.
Iger Shop, believe it or not, has retained a few fans. I have read about those Iger Shop fans holding up this horror comic or that story as paragons of craft and terror. I have read some of these stories, and I recoiled at first reaction. Because before I knew it was an Iger piece of patchwork, intuition was telling me there was something wrong with the art. After digesting these better stories, I started seeing an argument in the ones that the defenders of Iger held up to the light. Actually, I am going to agree with them. But they are the exceptions. The rule for this type of work is that it is not just the trash everybody believed it to be in those days, it was the type that lined the trash bin at the very bottom to collect the ooze that spilled from everything that was thrown in it. Iger was getting his revenues, and that was all that could have mattered to someone who supported such a system. It’s filler material, something to sell to comic book publishing companies that need pages with which to pad their flimsy magazines.