Joe Kubert | Comic book artist, 85

Posted: August 18, 2012

Joe Kubert, the influential comic book artist and writer whose rugged, hyper-masculine artwork included Tarzan, the flying super-hero Hawkman, the World War II infantryman Sgt. Rock, and graphic novels about the Bosnian war and the Holocaust, died Aug. 12 at a hospital in Morristown, N.J.

A spokesman at Mr. Kubert's comic trade school, the Dover, N.J.-based Kubert School, said the cause was multiple myeloma.

Mr. Kubert, whose career spanned more than seven decades, started in comic books during the industry's infancy as a boy prodigy. He was perhaps best known for the two war comics he cocreated for D.C. Comics with writer Robert Kanighter, Sgt. Rock and Easy Company, as well as Enemy Ace.

Mr. Kubert was a master of crosshatching, a technique that uses closely drawn parallel and crossed lines. He routinely inked his own pencils, which made his work immediately recognizable and distinct from the assembly line approach of other comic book illustrators.

Although he freelanced for comic companies, Mr. Kubert was mostly associated with D.C., where he held an executive position beginning in 1967. He left his editorial duties at D.C. to open the Kubert School in 1976, an accredited trade school for comic book artists.

In later decades, Mr. Kubert returned to war stories - or antiwar stories, as he preferred - with a series of graphic novels.

Joseph Kubert was born Sept. 18, 1926, in Yzeran in what was then Poland and now part of Ukraine. He came to the United States as an infant and was raised in Brooklyn. His wife, Muriel Fogelson Kubert, who helped start the Kubert School, died in 2008. Survivors include five children; three sisters; 12 grandchildren; and a great-grandchild. - Washington Post

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