Stan Goldberg Ailing

Photo by Bruce Guthrie
Photo by Bruce Guthrie

Veteran comic book artist Stan Goldberg had a stroke three days ago.  Yesterday, he was moved from the hospital into hospice care.

Stan is 82 and had been making a miraculous recovery since he and his wife of 47 years, Pauline, were injured in an automobile crash last year. They amazed everyone by showing up for the National Cartoonists Society gathering last May in San Diego, and Stan was hoping to (but could not) make it to Comic-Con two months later.

Stan was born in 1932 in New York and went to work for Marvel when he was 17, primarily as a colorist. In fact, there were periods at Marvel when Stan either headed the coloring department or was the coloring department. He colored all the early super-hero titles in the sixties. He was the man responsible for Spider-Man's costume having the colors it has. He was the man who made the Hulk green and so on. The artists whose work he colored all thought he was terrific.

He also had a long career drawing, usually in what we think of as the "Archie" style. He occasionally did something more realistic but mainly drew comics like Millie the Model for Marvel, Swing with Scooter for DC and Archie for Archie.  Most of these were unsigned and some that were signed were signed with someone else's name since the Archie company didn't like to find out their artists were drawing that way for competitors.

No one has ever totaled up how many pages Stan drew of Archie and his friends but the total was certainly well into the thousands. That association lasted for 40 years, ending in 2010 and he was startled and puzzled when it did end. For the last decade or so with them, he was not only kept busy but did many of their most prominent works, including the Archie newspaper strip, the much-publicized Archie-Punisher crossover comic and most covers. He told friends that he honestly did not know why they had suddenly decided to dispense with his services.

He stayed busy. He worked on other projects including Simpsons comic books and a nice array of Archie parodies and knock-offs. In 2012, the National Cartoonists Society presented him with its prestigious Gold Key Award, and he and Pauline were active in the group, Parents of Murdered Children, which they joined after the tragic slaying of their daughter Heidi, who was then a college student.

As I mentioned, he is now in hospice care.  His family thinks he would welcome cards and notes sent to…

Stan Goldberg
c/o Calvary Hospital
1740 Eastchester Rd.
Bronx, NY 10461

Please do not attempt to call.  But mail cheered Stan considerably during his long hospital stay from the traffic accident and it could do it again.

He has always been known as one of the most prolific, nicest artists in the comic book business and someone of whom I have been very fond. Everyone is. You'd have had to be a pretty rotten human being not to love Stan Goldberg. He would sit with me for hours at conventions or N.C.S. gatherings telling tales of the early days of Marvel. He was one of the last eyewitnesses to those days and very proud to have been a part of them. This is news that hits hard because he was always a wonderful artist and an even more wonderful person.