Number 905


The Eyes of Greed!


Howard Peter "Pete" Tumlinson was an illustrator who drew for Timely/Marvel/Atlas during the '40s and '50s, working in a variety of genres, but is known for his stint on Kid Colt. When he left comics in the mid-'50s he went into illustration. Earlier, before the war, he was a student at Texas A&M, where he created a character called Old Sarge for the campus humor magazine, The Battalion. You can read an article about it here.

Tumlinson is an artist I haven't really heard much about, one of those journeymen comic book artists who worked in the field for a time and then left. I think what Tumlinson left behind was pretty good. I've got two horror stories by him, which show that besides drawing cowboys and horses he could also draw the weird stuff Atlas was known for.

"The Eyes" has some real atmosphere to it, although the ending seems more like a shaggy dog story. It comes from Astonishing #30 in 1954; "Greed" is from Astonishing Tales #36, and is included because I was struck by how much the aliens in this mid-'50s story look like Kodos and Kang, from the annual The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes. I scanned "Greed" from the early '70s reprint in Weird Wonder Tales #5.

Pete Tumlinson died in 2008, age 87.