Lou Fine

Lou Fine was born to a Jewish family[3] in either the Manhattan[4] or Brooklyn[5] boroughs of New York City, the son of a house painter, Meyer, who was possibly a Russian immigrant.

Other early pseudonyms Fine employed (reflecting the fledgling Eisner & Iger's attempts to convince publishers they had a large stable of artists) were Curt Davis and Basil Berold.

Fine, along with Plastic Man creator Jack Cole, was a ghost artist on Will Eisner's celebrated Sunday-supplement newspaper comic book The Spirit during Eisner's World War II military service,[citation needed] Fine inking over Cole's pencil work.

[6] Fine is credited with being the first comics artist to draw a line of saliva running between the upper and lower teeth in a character's open mouth[7] (a device commonly associated with Kirby).

Starting out at Johnstone and Cushing,[8] he formed his own company with Don Komisarov,[9] whom he had met doing The Throp Family for Liberty in 1946.

[citation needed] In a single return to comic books, he contributed to a toy company's custom one-shot, Wham-O Giant Comics (1967), illustrating a two-page story, "The Man From Aeons", starring a prehistoric man who, though named "Tor", was not the same-name caveman character created in the 1950s by Joe Kubert.

[citation needed] He and writer Gill Fox, whom he had met during his time with Eisner & Iger and remained in contact with, were developing new comic strips when Fine was found dead of a heart attack in his studio.

Hit Comics #5 (Nov. 1940). This cover, used in The Steranko History of Comics 2 (1972), helped introduce Fine's art to a new generation.