Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

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In 1940 Harry Donenfeld paid $100 to commission the first full-length oil painting of Superman to promote The Adventures of Superman, a radio show that debuted inNew York City on February 12, 1940. The painting hung for many years in  Donenfeld’s office at DC Comics, and later, in his townhouse. It was eventually donated to Lehman College, part of the City University of New York.

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The commissioned artist was HJ Ward, then thirty years of age. Ward was pleased at the exposure this work afforded him beyond the world of the pulps. He aspired to the greater prestige and better pay offered by the slick magazines, but publishers of such publications showed little interest in his work, even after he finally made his first sale of a cover painting to Liberty magazine in 1939. Tragically, he would die young, in 1945,  from lung cancer. He was just 35.

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H. J. Ward

 

Hugh Joseph Ward (March 8, 1909 – February 7, 1945), who usually signed his work H. J. Ward, was an American illustrator known for his cover art for pulp magazines. He is noted especially for his paintings for Spicy Mystery, Spicy Detective, and other titles published by Harry Donenfeld in the weird menace genre. He also painted definitive images of popular radio characters the Lone Ranger and the Green Hornet.

 

 

Ward was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in a working-class neighborhood. He was the youngest of six children of Mary C. Ward and Charles A. Ward. His interest in drawing was encouraged by a high school art teacher. With the goal of becoming a commercial artist, he enrolled in a four-year diploma program at Pennsylvania Business School of Industrial Art in September 1927, where his teachers included Thornton Oakley. He later named N. C. Wyeth, who was guest lecturer at the school, as his most influential teacher.

 

The death of Ward's father in 1929 reduced his family's resources, and Ward was forced to drop out of the art program after completing only three years. In 1930 he became a graphic artist for The Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper, where he was employed to execute lettering for display advertisements. His duties at the Inquirer soon expanded to include drawing spot illustrations and political cartoons.

 

Ward's ambition was to become a free-lance illustrator for magazines. In 1931 at age twenty-two he began to travel by train to New York City in order to visit any pulp publishers who would take the time to look at his portfolio of prospective paintings for western magazines. He made his first sale on August 24, 1931, to Teck Publishing Corporation, which purchased two paintings that later were used on the covers of Complete Detective Novel and Wild West Stories and Complete Novel Magazine. Sensational pulp covers by H.J. Ward were soon appearing on Ace-High Western, Argosy, Double Detective, Easy Money, Prison Life Stories, Rangeland Love, Red Star Detective, and Red Star Mystery.

 

 

In August 1934, Ward married Viola Conley, who became his model for all the women in his pulp magazine covers. Eschewing the use of photographs, he painted her directly from life. He became noted for his depictions of women reacting in horror to various lurid threats. Pulp historian David Saunders describes Ward as "inspired by the heartrending drama of death's cruel dominion over life's fragile and sensuous beauty".

 

In October 1935, Ward was able to quit his job at the Philadelphia Inquirer and devote his energies to his burgeoning career as a pulp cover artist. Most of his work was done for Harry Donenfeld's Culture Publications (later renamed Trojan Publications), publisher of Hollywood Detective, Lone Ranger, Paris Gayety, Pep, Romantic Detective, Spicy Adventure, Spicy Detective, Spicy Mystery, Spicy Western, and other titles. Ward painted an average of about 50 covers per year for Donenfeld's magazines. He also painted occasional covers for other publishers' pulps, such as Street and Smith's Sport Story and Munsey's Red Star Mystery.

 

In 1937 Ward was hired by George Washington Trendle to develop iconic images of the Lone Ranger and the Green Hornet radio characters to be used for merchandising.

 

Ward was inducted into the US Army on April 13, 1944. In September of that year, a debilitating pain in his right shoulder was diagnosed as advanced lung cancer. He died at the age of 35 on February 7, 1945.

 

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Robert Lesser's Pulp Art features a great Ward cover and there are more examples within.

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however, the monograph by Illustrated Press is the definitive volume.

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