Recently here, like in this post, I wrote about how comic historians and dealers in original art have a little blind spot when it comes to identifying unsigned art from Dell and Gold Key comic books of the past. If they don't know better, they usually attribute artwork to Pete Alvarado, a lovely and prolific man who drew tons of comics for Western Publishing, the company that assembled those comics. But like I said, Pete didn't draw everything. There were other artists.
It has been called to my attention that a few years ago, Heritage Auctions — the largest firm of its kind — auctioned off a number of pieces which they said were drawn by "Del Connell (attributed)". These pieces are still available for viewing in their online listings and…well, I dunno who attributed them to Del but they were wrong.
Del was a prolific writer-editor for Western Publishing from about 1951 until the firm stopped producing comics around 1984. He was my editor there for a time…a very nice, creative gentleman who wrote more comic book stories than most human beings have ever read. He drew a little for the purposes of art corrections and such but I'm not sure he ever drew an actual story or cover for publication. The pieces they attribute to him were actually drawn by several different artists including John Carey, Tony Strobl and John Langton. The above panel is from a Yosemite Sam comic there that was actually drawn by…yes, Pete Alvarado.
Heritage Auctions is a respectable outfit and I'm sure its staff did what it could to ascertain the proper credits. (I also suspect that they got these pieces from Del or someone close to him and may have been told they were Del's handiwork.) The problem is that there hasn't been much scholarship in this area and there's really no place you can look it up and check. To Heritage's credit, they put in that "attributed," which is all an identifier can really do in such circumstances and in the past when I've pointed these things out, they're really good about correcting bad info. I just mention it here because I want everyone to realize that an awful lot of the art identifications on this stuff are off…and most who err do not even have the decency to hedge their bets and say, "attributed."