We're just now learning — thank you, Anthony Tollin — of the passing of veteran comic book/strip artist Frank Bolle on May 12 at the age of 95. Over the years, Mr. Bolle worked on at least two dozen newspaper strips, sometimes as a ghost artist or assistant and sometimes credited. Among them would be Winnie Winkle, On Stage, Tarzan, Gil Thorp, The Girls of Apartment 3-G, Rip Kirby and The Heart of Juliet Jones. He was equally prolific in comic books.
Born in Brooklyn, he began drawing comics in 1943, assisting other artists at first but working solo within the year. Soon, his work turned up at Timely (now Marvel) Comics, Fawcett, Lev Gleason and Magazine Enterprises. It was for the last of these that he co-created the masked western heroine, The Black Phantom, who was neither black nor a phantom. She was however, like all the women he drew, extremely attractive.
In the fifties and beyond, he worked for DC and Atlas and began a long association with Western Publishing on their Dell and later Gold Key Comics. Among the comics he did for Western were Flash Gordon, The Twilight Zone, Grimm's Ghost Stories and Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom. For Charlton, he drew The Phantom and many, many romance comics. He also popped up at Marvel from time to time, usually inking for comics like The Defenders and their Captain Marvel. All of this was in addition to his long stint drawing a number of features for Boys' Life, the official magazine of the Boy Scouts of America.
More often than most artists, he was anonymous but you could spot his clean, attractive style and often, he would sneak an "FWB" (his initials) somewhere in a panel. From all indications, he worked until just a few years ago, capping off a career that spanned over 70 years.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Mr. Bolle on a panel at Comic-Con International in 2004 when he also received an Inkpot Award for his long, illustrious career. He was a charming gent who seemed genuinely surprised that so many fans knew of his work and had comics of his they wanted him to sign. If they'd brought every comic in which his art appeared, that would have been a very, very large pile.