Pulp artist H.J. Ward

When it comes to spicy pulp covers, the artist I think of is H.J. Ward (1909-45). But I was surprised to learn that he actually did a lot more, including work on The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet. And sadly to realize that had he lived longer, he might have continued his career doing covers for the men’s adventure magazines and maybe into paperbacks.

David Saunders did an article on him in Illustration #8 in 2010 that filled the entire issue, and this was expanded that year in a hardcover book from Illustrated Press running almost 300 pages. It’s out of print, but if you look you may find a copy at a reasonable price.

While Ward got started doing covers for other publishers, the bulk of his pulp-cover work was for Harry Donenfeld‘s spicy pulp line at Culture/Trojan publications. I was surprised that I had seen several of his covers before but didn’t know they were by Ward. And when you see many of them side by side, you realize that the same model had to have been used for many of the covers. One possible model was noted for his earlier works. And we know that many of his later covers used his wife, Viola, as the model.

When Donenfeld got the rights to do The Lone Ranger pulp, Ward did the covers after the first one. George Trendle, owner of WXYZ in Detroit and the owner of The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet, was so impressed that he hired Ward to do the definitive artwork for both characters that would be used for advertisement. The Lone Ranger as seen on the pulps isn’t how we imagine him, based on the TV show. So it’s interesting to see how Ward’s later work moved him closer to that version. And he did artwork for a third radio show from Trendle that I had never heard of.

Further, as Donenfeld was the owner of DC Comics, Ward was hired to do a large-format painting of Superman to promote the radio show. For this, he used his brother-in-law as the model. And later, the covers for Super-Detective that highlighted Jim Anthony. Jim is clearly based on Superman’s physique; he again used his brother-in-law to model.  We also learn that Joe Szokoli did work on several of his covers to allow them to be reused, and even made some updates to the Superman portrait.

Ward did artwork for Munsey for some of their later pulp heroes under the Red Star line (Don Diavolo, The Green Lama, and more).

He joined the army and discovered he had advanced lung cancer and sadly died at age 35. So young. He could have continued as a pulp artist, maybe moved into the men’s adventure magazines or the slicks or who knows what, similar to other pulp artists of the time.

But get either the Illustration issue or, ideally, the book. He did some great work during his short life.