Frank Robbins
Frank Robbins was born on 9 Sep. 1917 in Boston, Massachusetts. His mother, who was 47 when he was born, divorced his father and the boy was mostly left alone.

Frank showed an early interest in expressing himself with the help of pictures, and at the age of seven his mother let him take drawing lessons. He spent a lot of time surrounded by great art at the museum, and it is quite possible that he picked up a lot of anatomical tips from the old masters.

At age 15 he got his first job in New York, and soon he was drawing movie posters for RKO pictures, but was not entirely satisfied with that.

Via poster work he proceeded into adventure comic strips, and in 1939 he worked as artist on the pilot strip “Scorchy Smith”, created in 1930 by John Terry. He received $60.00 every week for his work artist and writer on the strip, not bad for a 21 year old at that time.

Not unlike a lot of other artists/writers in comics he was not happy working on another man’s creation, and he soon left the Scorchy strip. When King Features Syndicate searched for new artists in 1944 he had his own strip to show them, Johnny Hazard, and soon thereafter a contract was written. About six weeks later he was asked for an additional Sunday version of Hazard, which resulted in another story run than the one created for the dailies.

As we can see from the index on this site, the Johnny Hazard strip almost lasted until the very end of the 70s, but Robbins had already been looking for other ways to draw for a living. He got involved in comic book work, delivered some scripts to DC as well as Marvel and worked as an artist on some of the books. But sadly for Robbins he soon had to quit and leave the comic industry.

We don’t know much about what he did after he left the comic strips and books, but he did some work as a picture artist, and in 1982 when DC tried to return original work to the artists he was nowhere to be found and was thus listed as “disappeared” on their list.

Anyway, with Johnny Hazard Frank Robbins delivered a well made adventure comic strip as regards both art and script, something every fan of such should be grateful for.

IpComics