Long-time comic-book and comic-strip artist George Evans died Friday, June 22, at 3:00 a.m., following a heart attack earlier that week. Blood work done in connection with the incident revealed that Evans was in the late stages of an aggressive form of leukemia, probably allowing him only weeks to live. Evans elected to suspend further treatment and returned home to await the end.

Most summations of Evans's career tend to focus on his work for EC comics, where he specialized mostly in crime and war stories, but he was a prolific contributor to many companies and most genres. Before joining EC, he did extensive work for Fawcett's horror line, and after EC, he continued to produce crime, mystery and war material for other companies, including Atlas (Marvel's 1950s incarnation) and Classics Illustrated. Later, in the 1970s, he produced horror and war comics for DC, and horror stories for Marvel. He did little superhero work, for anyone; the rare exceptions include some Doctor Doom/Sub-Mariner material for Marvel at about this time. He also drew many stories for the National Lampoon's various comics-format articles.

For most of Evans' later career, however, he was a comic strip artist, being of a generation that attached greater prestige to the strip format, and enjoying what he regarded as more mature subject matter. He was one of the consistent ghosts (uncredited illustrators) on the George Wunder Terry and the Pirates stip, and he wrote and drew the last years of King Features' Secret Agent Corrigan (originally X-9) strip. Corrigan seems to have been a personal favorite and later stories featured an oddball humorous and very political approach that no doubt would have baffled the strip's original reader.

Evans was a fan of WWI-era aviation and some of his best-remembered comic book work reflected that interest. He was the chief artist on EC's Aces High! book, and served as consultant for the title, though he later noted that most of his suggestions were declined. His Classics Illustrated output included an issue of The World Around Us that focused on the history of aviation, and in the 1960s, he tried to sell The Flying Swifts, a proposed syndicate strip about a family of pilots. Some of his latter-day work for DC included WWI aviation stories, though he was not partial to the scripts and had particular disdain for DC's Enemy Ace character.

Evans was a classically trained illustrator and one of the industry's best-ever draftsmen, combining excellent anatomy and figure work with well-researched and well-rendered backgrounds, presented with effective layouts and storytelling. Interviews and correspondence showed him to be highly opinionated, articulate and pragmatic in discussions of his work; almost alone among the EC artists, he did not idealize working at the company, and he was willing to voice specific and well-reasoned criticisms of the work of editor Harvey Kurtzman, with whom he worked on several stories. Like many of his generation, he preferred to both pencil and ink his work, but his collaborators included Reed Crandall (Classics Illustrated), Jack Abel and Frank Springer (later Marvel material).

--Pierce Askegren

Posted June-25-2001