As is way too usual around these parts, we must report the passing of another fine artist from what some call "The Golden Age of Comics." Artie Saaf died yesterday. The cause of death was complications from the Parkinson's Disease that had plagued him for many years.
Saaf was another of those guys who was in comics practically from the start. Born in Brooklyn on December 4, 1921, he was self-taught when he began drawing comics in 1938, though he later attended Pratt Institute, the School of Arts and Mechanics and the Art Students League. He worked for almost every company publishing out of New York at first but his steadiest account was Fiction House, where he became the main artist for a time on Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, an assignment which somewhat typed him as a specialist in drawing pretty ladies. Fiction House kept him pretty busy but he also ghosted the Hap Hopper newspaper strip for a time and often turned up in the pages of Thrilling Comics, Startling Comics and other books from Better Publishing.
Around 1954, he began working less in comics and more in advertising, particularly in the storyboarding of TV commercials. Most of his comic book work for the next decade and a half involved helping out other artists when he had time. Some of the romance comic art that is usually credited to Vince Colletta in the early sixties was actually pencilled by Saaf, for instance. He did occasional jobs on his own for Western Publishing and Dell but around 1967, he seems to have made a conscious decision to focus more on comics. A flurry of Saaf art began appearing in Western's Gold Key comics like Twilight Zone and Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery, and he began drawing for DC.
For DC, he drew (pencils and inks) the Hunter's Hellcats feature in Our Fighting Forces, but mostly pencilled, mainly on ghost comics (Ghosts, The Witching Hour, The Unexpected) and several that featured those pretty ladies. He did many romance stories inked by Vince Colletta and was the main artist on Supergirl with a few jobs on Lois Lane, Angel and the Ape and even Teen Titans. Illness and age brought a close to his comic book work around 1978…a great loss for us because his art was lively and always interesting. No one drew the female figure in action better than Artie Saaf.
More information on him — though sadly, not enough — is available over at www.artsaaf.com, a site set up by his son, Steve. I had the pleasure of meeting Steve at this year's Wondercon in San Francisco. In the later years of his life, Art was unable to recall many details of his long, impressive career and Steve's been on a mission to research it. At the convention, he had a long conversation with Nick Cardy, who worked for many of the same companies and even inked Art Saaf work on occasion. Nick helped fill in some of the gaps but there are many more and if you have any information, I'm sure Steve would welcome hearing from you. His father was a good and important contributor to the field and that should be properly documented.