One of America's great portrait painters, Everett Raymond Kinstler, died last Sunday at the age of 92. Kinstler's portraits of the famous and powerful hang in important buildings all across this land and even presidents would pose for him. Starting with Richard Nixon, Kinstler painted every single one except Barack Obama. He was brilliant at capturing the essence of anyone he put on canvas.
So why am I writing about him on this blog? Because before he became a painter of well-known faces, Mr. Kinstler was a comic book artist…and a very good one. Growing up in New York City, he attended the School of Industrial Art there, quitting school just before he turned sixteen to work in various "shops" (studios) as an apprentice. Most of his work at that age involved inking the work of other artists for the Sangor Shop. That led to his earliest solo work which seems to have been for Better Comics in 1942.
Kinstler jumped around from publisher to publisher. Among the companies that bought his work were Avon, Archie, Ziff-Davis, Fawcett and Marvel. He rarely worked on features that are remembered today but he drew some Hawkman stories for DC in 1947, some Zorro for Western Publishing in 1953 and '54, and Black Hood for Archie in 1945. Mostly, he did anthology-type stories for various books and especially excelled on westerns and romance stories. In the forties and fifties, he also drew for pulp magazines including Doc Savage and Ranch Romances.
In the mid-fifties as work became harder to get in comics, he did more and more painting for advertising and book illustration. His last work in comics appears to have been educational stories for Gilberton (the Classics Illustrated people) around 1960. From then on, demand for his services as a painter took him forever away from comics.
But he recalled those years fondly as I learned when I interviewed him at the 2006 Comic-Con International. I wrote then on this blog, "It's always nice when I get to meet a veteran comic artist I've never met before but whose work I've always admired. Everett Raymond Kinstler is a charming, classy gentleman." That, he was…and very talented charming, classy gentleman.