[3] At 17, Tuska moved to New York City, rooming with his cousin Annie, and a year later began attending the National Academy of Design.

His studio colleagues later grew to include artists Charles Sultan, John Celardo, and Nick Cardy, and writer Toni Blum.

Writer-artist and company co-founder Will Eisner recalled of the period, "It was a friendly shop, and I guess I was the same age as the youngest guys there.

[7] The otherwise mild-mannered Tuska, thinking comic books "would last two or three years — a fad",[8] later left to seek non-comics work.

[10] Alongside colleagues that included Sultan, Ruben Moreira, Mac Raboy, and Ralph Astarita,[9] Tuska helped to supply content for such Fawcett Comics publications as Captain Marvel Adventures.

[9] Later, when Eisner-Iger client Fiction House formed its own bullpen to produce work on staff, Tuska left Chesler to join Cardy, Jim Mooney, Graham Ingels and other artists there.

At some point, Tuska again worked for Will Eisner, now split from Jerry Iger, with a group of artists including Alex Kotzky and Tex Blaisdell.

Drafted into the U.S. Army circa 1942, Tuska was stationed at the 100th Division at Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina where he worked in headquarters drawing artillery.

[18] Returning home, he took up again with Fiction House, drawing a host of stories featuring Reef Ryan, Rip Carson, Lady Satan, the Western hero Golden Arrow, and Camilla, Queen of the Jungle.

[13] Following the huge popularity of superheroes during the World War II years, those characters' appeal began to dwindle in the post-war era.

[22] He quickly went on to draw in an abundance of genres for Atlas, including crime fiction (in titles including Crime Can't Win, Crime Exposed, Private Eye, Justice, Amazing Detective Cases, and All True Crime Cases Comics); military fiction (Men in Action, War Combat, Man Comics, Battlefield, and Battle); horror (Adventures into Weird Worlds, Adventures into Terror, Mystic, Menace, and Strange Tales); and, particularly, Westerns (Black Rider, Gunsmoke Western, Kid Colt, Outlaw, Red Warrior, Texas Kid, Two-Gun Kid, Western Outlaws & Sheriffs, Wild Western, and many others) through 1957, while also occasionally contributing to Lev Gleason and St. John Publications.

[13] Simultaneously at first, from 1954 to 1959, Tuska took over as writer-artist for the failing adventure comic strip Scorchy Smith,[9] supplying "eye-catching drawings and interesting plots, but it was too late".

Tuska became a Marvel mainstay, penciling and occasionally inking other artists on series as diverse as Ghost Rider, Sub-Mariner, and The X-Men.

"[27] Shanna the She-Devil was created by Carole Seuling, Steve Gerber, and Tuska in the eponymous first issue of that character's own series.

[29] Due to Marvel not having the likeness rights for Charlton Heston, the star of the film, one of the lawyers at 20th Century Fox insisted on changes to Tuska's art.

But his drawing was so quickly assayed, and so essentially flavorless, that he became the King of the Fill-In Issue, hopping in to provide bland, forgettable work whenever someone else blew a deadline.

John Romita Sr., Marvel's de facto and later official art director during this period, found Tuska "so versatile.

His signature flourish may have been characters in arrested motion, coiled in preparation for violence like so many pulp heroes of an earlier generation, legs splayed in the form of a near-base ready for what might come next.

[36] By this time, his health had become a handicap; Jim Shooter, who scripted an issue of Daredevil penciled by Tuska in 1977, recalled that, "George Tuska was at the end of his brilliant career, he was mostly deaf, communication was difficult, and though he showed occasional flashes of the chops that made him a big name artist in his day, I don't think his work on Daredevil was anywhere near his best.

[38] Retired from active comics work as of the 2000s, Tuska late in life moved from Hicksville, New York, on Long Island,[39] to Manchester Township, New Jersey, with his wife Dorothy ("Dot"), where he did commissioned art.