Rudy Palais, R.I.P.

I don't have many details — only that he "died two weeks ago" — but I wanted to note the passing of Rudy Palais, one of comic art's most distinctive sylists. In his day, which was roughly from the beginning of comics into the sixties, he (and his brother Walter) worked for most of the New York publishers, and I believe Rudy started with a job in the Harry "A" Chesler shop in 1939. He worked briefly for DC on Doctor Mid-Nite, for Holyoke on Catman, for Quality Comics on Blackhawk, Doll Man and Phantom Lady, and for Charles Biro on the original Daredevil. His most notable assignments were a 20-year tour-of-duty drawing intermittent tales for Classics Illustrated and a number of horror comics he drew in the fifties, especially for Harvey. (He also drew for the early EC crime and horror titles.)

His work was quite organic, and some scholars of the form have compared his horror work favorably to that of "Ghastly" Graham Ingels, noting that like Ingels, Palais had a way of making creepy things ooze right off the page. In the sixties, Palais turned up in the pages of Charlton comics. I believe his last art was for The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves — very odd, impressionistic short stories — and then he did some lettering work for them before retiring from comics around 1969. I never met the man but I followed his work and you could tell that he really cared about doing good comic art.