The Man Who Drew Mars Attacks Before Norman Saunders Painted It

Two of the sets on this index were made by at least four people. One of them is famous, one is reasonably well known, and one spent his entire working life under somebody else's name.

We have written about Norman Saunders and the fifty dollars a painting. This is about the man whose drawing is underneath the paint.

The pipeline, in full

Mars Attacks was not one artist's work. It ran through four hands before it reached a printing plate.

Len Brown and Woody Gelman created the story and made the rough sketches, with Brown writing the copy on the backs.

Wally Wood was brought in to flesh those roughs out. Wood is the reason the set exists at all: Brown had been inspired by Wood's cover for an EC Comics science fiction title and pitched the idea to Gelman off the back of it.

Bob Powell took Wood's roughs and produced the finished pencils.

Norman Saunders painted over Powell's pencils.

So the drawing you see on a Mars Attacks card is Powell's composition, executed in paint by somebody else, from a sketch by a third man, to a story by a fourth and fifth.

The same partnership produced three of the five 1966 Batman series. Powell pencilled, Saunders painted. Black Bat, Red Bat and Blue Bat are theirs; the last two switched to photographs.

And a fifth name, while we are counting

It is not even four. Maurice Blumenfeld painted somewhere between ten and twenty per cent of the Mars Attacks cards, with Saunders providing the finishing touches across all of them.

So on a given card the paint may be Blumenfeld's with Saunders working on top, over Powell's pencils, over Wood's rough, to Brown and Gelman's plan.

Almost nobody in that chain is named on the card, because the card names nobody at all.

Who Powell was

He was born Stanley Robert Pawlowski in 1916 and raised in Buffalo. He studied at the Pratt Institute in New York, and in the late 1930s went to work for Eisner and Iger, the studio that packaged whole comic books for publishers testing a new medium.

He drew Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, which is the best known thing he did in that period. He drew Mr Mystic in the Spirit Sunday section, written by Will Eisner. He co-created Spirit of '76.

And he co-plotted the first Blackhawk story, one of the enduring features of the era.

He received the credit for that in 1999.

He died in 1967.

The names

Here is the detail that makes him more than an uncredited collaborator.

He legally changed his name to S. Robert Powell in 1943, which is already one identity removed from the one he was born with.

And then he signed his published work under at least six more. Bob Stanley on Speed Comics. Terence McAully on Crack Comics. Stanley Charlot on Hit Comics. Bud Ernest on an aviation strip in Military Comics. Powell Roberts on Smash Comics. Rex Smith elsewhere.

That was not unusual practice. A packager supplying several titles to the same publisher wanted the credits to look like a full staff rather than three men working fast, so artists signed different pages under different names.

But the cumulative effect on one career is unusual. A man born Pawlowski, working as Powell, publishing as McAully and Charlot and Ernest, and then producing his most widely seen work with no name on it whatsoever.

What that means for the cards

Three things follow, and the third is the one worth holding.

The original art is a Powell as much as a Saunders. When the 1966 Batman paintings came to auction, the lots were catalogued as Saunders and Powell together: Powell's pencils, Saunders' paint, three and a half by four and three-quarter inches on Bristol board. The market has not entirely forgotten him.

The composition is his. What the Martian is doing, where the building is, how the figure sits in the frame. Saunders' colour is what you remember, and the arrangement underneath it is Powell's decision.

And the set's look comes from a comic artist, not an illustrator. That is why Mars Attacks reads like a horror comic rather than a pulp cover. Powell had spent the 1950s drawing Black Cat Mystery and Witches Tales for Harvey. The staging is comics staging, and it arrived through him.

What happened to him

In 1961 he became art director of Sick magazine, a humour title, and held the post until his death.

The Mars Attacks and Batman work was done freelance, alongside that job.

He died in 1967, aged fifty-one, twenty-two years before Saunders. The 1962 set that carries his drawing was by then five years old and had been withdrawn under pressure, which we have written about in the piece on why Topps pulled it.

He did not live to see any of it become collectible.

The thing worth sitting with

In 2018 one of the Mars Attacks paintings sold at auction for forty-eight thousand dollars.

Saunders was paid a flat fee for it and did not own it. Powell's pencils are underneath the paint, invisible, and he was paid a freelance rate for those in 1962.

Neither man's name is on the card. One of them is now the answer to a trivia question and the other is a footnote in the first one's biography.

He had spent thirty years being other people, and the work that outlived him by the widest margin is the work with no name on it at all.

This index tracks the 1962 Mars Attacks set and all five 1966 Batman issues card by card and grade by grade. You can read how we work the numbers out.

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