GOLDEN AGE GREAT : ALEX SCHOMBURG By Steve Duin, Oct/Dec '93. Overstreet's Golden Age Quarterly #2.

Thanks to Steve Duin for giving his permission to reprint this article. Steve is the co-author of "Comics: Between the Panels," a 500-page history of comics that was published by Dark Horse in 1998. Autographed and/or inscribed first editions are available for $39.50. Steve's e-mail address is steveduin@aol.com. Dark Horse will be publishing his new book, "Blast Off," a history of vintage space toys, in September 2001.

At the annoying age of 88, Alex Schomburg doesn't spend a lot of time looking over his shoulder, but he's usually looking over mine, searching for who’s following me through the door. My questions don’t move him the way my three-year-old, Lauren’s, do; they don’t climb into his lap and celebrate the reunion with a breathless hug.

Unlike most of the creatures Schomburg brought into this world, Lauren is persistent flesh and blood. He welcomes her with an enthusiasm he can’t generate for the old magazines and mylar-ed comic books beneath my arm. They are relics. Ancient history. When he peers at the images he painted 50 or more years ago, you can hear Simon and Garfunkel singing wistfully: "Long ago. It must be. I have a photograph." The photographs don’t move him anymore to turn his head or lower his shoulder.

He’s not unwilling to glance back toward the past, now and then, but when you point Schomburg in a certain direction, he doesn’t always end up there. Push him toward Stan Lee and he may lead you to Hugo Gernsback. Ask him about life in New York, and he might end up on the roof above the National Screen service offices, where he worked in the early ‘30s. He never forgotten the view, you understand. "We all had binoculars," Schomburg said, "and at lunch we’d all go up and watch the chorus girls sunbathing on a nearby roof. They didn’t want the sun to burn them, so they’d take their tops off so the tan lines wouldn’t show.

"We’d send the office boy out for sandwiches."

Alex, Alex…snap out of it. Or pass the binoculars. From a distance, Schomburg is best know for the comic-book covers he produced between 1939 and 1945. Small wonder: The artist painted approximately 530 covers during the Golden Age, including - by my count - 296 for Standard/Nedor and 199 for Timely. He did, for example, all but 11 covers for the first 69 issues of Marvel Mystery Comics.

But when you nudge Shomburg toward the best work of his life, he doesn’t take you on a walk through Ernie Gerber’s Photo-Journal Guide to Comic Books.

Schomburg is prouder of the work he did away from comic books, particularly in science fiction. "That," Schomburg said "is where I felt I did my best."

Schomburg’s first cover art appeared not on the September 1939 issue of the pulp Startling Stories, or splashed across the third issue of Marvel Mystery (January 1940), but a full 15 years earlier. In 1925, Schomburg, then 20, met Hugo Gernsback in the latter’s New York office. Gernsback would later become famous for publishing such pulps as Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories, but Schomburg was attracted by a Gernsback gambit entitled Radio News. He’d carefully followed the magazines instructions to construct a small radio, but the contraption wouldn’t work. So he marched straight to Gernsback for a lesson on what he’d done wrong.

Gernsback, who was born in Luxembourg, probably agreed to see Schomburg because of his German name. He’d designed the first home radio set in 1905, and he found the flaw in this kit about the time Schomburg pulled out some art he had done for a typewriter-instruction pamphlet. Gernsback liked what he saw and asked Schomburg for some circuitry illustrations.

By December, Schomburg had worked his way onto the cover of a Gernsback magazine called The Experimenter. He painted one other of the magazine in 1926, then moved on to National Screen Service.

"Schomburg’s early work for Gernsback was pretty crude," said Sam Moskowitz, who edited Gernsback rival magazine, Science Fiction Plus, in the 50’s. "He wasn’t a polished artist then, and Gernsback had some pretty polished artists working for him, like Frank R. Paul. He didn’t need Schomburg."

Gernsback needed him when World War II began, drafting him to produce some 50 covers for Radio Craft magazine. Each month, Gernsback would drag Schomburg into his office and toss out some half-baked fantasy. A mobile radio station. An electronic artillery locator. The dreaded robot television tank.

"They were stupid ideas," Moskowitz said. "He had lots of them." Schomburg was required to capture each brainstorm and somehow make it believable.

In the meantime, Schomburg was drawing was panoramas for Whitman Publishing. The company asked Schomburg and his brother, August, to produce a total of eight war scenes that could be chopped into jigsaw puzzles, but the eight paintings were used to illustrate a 1944 Whitman book, U.S. Soldiers in Action.

The intensity and detail of the paintings testify to the superiority of Alex’s gift. Four of the six Schomburg brothers - August, Frederick, Charles and Alex - had opened a Manhattan art studio in 1923, but only August and Alex successfully struck out on their own. August, who’s at the top of his form in another Whitman enterprises, the 100 Soldiers Punch-out Book, didn’t take his brothers talent edge personally. "When he had something he couldn’t handle, he’d give it to me," Schomburg said.

Yet the two brothers had a combative relationship. "He had a terrific temper," Schomburg said. "Gus liked money too much. He used to put pressure on the clients to pay the bills. That was against my policy. He and I argued constantly about that."

Did August end up with more money?

"No," Schomburg said, "he ended up losing customers." And testing his brother's patience. At one point, a nasty tumor developed on August’s left shin. "It wasn’t cancerous," Schomburg said, "but it wouldn’t heal. He went to some doctor who wanted to cut the leg off below the knee. So, Gus came to me borrow the money."

August needed about $500 and Alex wouldn’t give it to him. "I told him to get another doctor’s opinion," Schomburg said, "and he did. The other doctor said there was no need to cut off the leg. Instead, he fitted him with some kind of aluminum shield. Gus died with his two legs on."

Schomburg’s work for Gernsback and Whitman pales beside his portfolio for his most generous client, Standard Publishing. Those 296 comic-book covers - on such books as Exciting, Thrilling, Startling, Wonder and the Fighting Yank - are only the beginning.

Schomburg produced hundreds of pages of black-and-white interiors for the pulps in the 1930’s. He refined his gifts for good-girl art by drawing half-naked women for sadistic/horror magazines such as Uncanny Tales and Mystery Tales, and cranked out tamer drawings for Standard's pulp line.

In 1941, Schomburg did the cover art for Standard's first issue of Best Crossword puzzles. For the next 14 years, he illustrated most of the covers - and supplied interior art - for other Standard magazines such as Popular Crossword Puzzles, Astrology and Everyday Astrology. The early pieces of art evoke his comic book work, the later issues his evolving interest in science fiction.

In the early ‘50’s, Schomburg illustrated several of Standard's Popular Library risqué paperback titles, but saved most of his strength for a variety of science-fiction magazines covers between 1950 and 1954. "By the time he started drawing for Science Fiction Plus in 1953," Moskowitz said, "he was as good as anyone around."

As passionate, as stylish and as funny. For the March 1955 issue of Fantastic Universe, Schomburg drew a flying saucer spinning on its edge down Connecticut’s Merritt Parkway, crushing the cars in the slow lane. The purple car racing just beyond the saucer’s reach is the Schomburg family’s ’54 Buick.

"We had five Buicks, the first a ’31. That," Schomburg said, gesturing at the magazine cover, "was the last of them."

Schomburg was at the top of his form, and he wouldn’t surrender the summit for another 30 years. Still ahead were the Winston science-fiction hardcovers; Amazing Stories and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction; some 65 painted re-creations of his comic-book covers. Still ahead were the lean years when - "depending on how hungry I was," Schomburg said - he painted real estate signs, donation-box chimneys for Volunteers of America (heavy on the red and white) and sketches for Venus color-pencils sets.

He’s no longer hungry, but he still has his original airbrush, but he has very little of his original art. He doesn’t know that most of his Radio Craft covers were hung in a New York art dealer's window until they were bleached by the sun. He doesn’t want to think about the spaceships that went out with the trash or the covergirls he left behind. Hand him a fragile relic of his former passion and Schomburg soon hands the magazine back.

It is only a fading photograph of someone he used to know. They are only figures on a distant rooftop and, after all these years, Alex Schomburg has passed the binoculars. He doesn’t need to stare into the distance when my daughter is wriggling her way between us, wrapping her arms around his neck, and coloring his cheek with a kiss that will survive the long goodbye.

---

Schomburg Art Gallery Schomburg Checklist MAIN Site PAGE