Alex Schomburg

Alexander Schomburg, born Alejandro Schomburg y Rosa in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico (1905–1998), produced more than 500 comic covers in the 1930s and 1940s alone and is the definitive cover artist of the wartime era.

His trademark was the crowd cover: an enormous foreground hero surrounded by dozens of interlocking figures, war machines and exploding hardware, every square inch loaded with incident and the mechanical elements rendered with near-engineering precision. Stan Lee put it plainly: Schomburg was to comic books what Norman Rockwell was to the Saturday Evening Post.

Comics were arguably his second career. He was a major science-fiction illustrator for Thrilling Wonder Stories and for paperback publishers, earned a Hugo Award nomination in 1962 and an Inkpot Award in 1985, and was inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame in 1999. His working life spanned roughly seventy years.