Alex Schomburg was born in Puerto Rico and ran a New York art studio with his brothers before going solo. He signed part of his work Xela – his own first name reversed – and produced well over 500 covers in two decades.

Detail runs corner to corner, so it needs size to stay legible and quiet neighbours. Black frame, thin mount. M to L.

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.