I think Lou Cameron is the most underrated cartoonist of the '50s. He did a number of horror comics for obscure publishers but his finest work was undoubtedly his Classics Illustrated adaptations; The Time Machine, The War the Worlds, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Bottle Imp and others. His visual storytelling was always fluid and assured, his drawing strong and with a nice sensual edge to it. What I love most about Cameron's work is the way it was infused by his fertile imagination. This is most obvious in his science fiction pieces. His vision of Wells' War of the Worlds, with its fighting tripods and ravaged countryside, was excellent but I think The Time Machine was his most fully realized piece. His evocation of that far-off time, with its porcelain buildings - all sweeping domes and delicate spires - and its ruined museums filled with the mouldering technology of bygone ages, its walls inscribed in some unknown script of his own devising, showed the scope of Cameron's splendid creativity. The air of melancholy hanging over the story was also very much in the spirit of Wells Cameron's somewhat more "cartoonish" version of the leering, ape-like Hyde in the seedy garbage-strewn slums of Victorian London was very different in tone but deeply atmospheric.
Even in his biography of Davy Crockett which was very simply done and, one suspects, quickly produced there are qualides that make it interesting.
Cameron was quite inventive stylisticafly, too. Some of his pieces, like Dr. Jekyll, employed exceedingly fine penwork, while others, such as the R.L. Stevenson Tales of the South Seas, were innovatively rendered in thick pencil (rather than inked) giving the linework a rough, toothy edge. Cameron also drew a two-pager series on the history of Great Britain that ran at the tail end of several Classics IHustrated issues. What could have been a throwaway filler feature was, however, beautifully done and imbued with the same evocative drawing and imagery as his longer pieces.
Another unjusdy neglected cartoonist is Robert H. Webb who worked mostly for Fiction House in the '40s and drew one of the best renditions of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, in Jumbo Comics. Webb's figure drawing could be a bit stiff at times but his inking always had a great deal of character - there being a dark, sensual, and densely textured feel to his renderings. Webb had little taste for laying out his Sheena pages in a static grid pattern, so his panels were circular or diagonal or otherwise irregular in shape with borders snaking and zigzagging across the page. Action was framed by a profusion of jungle flora and fauna so that each page seethed with a primordial quality.
Webb brought a similar style and intensity to his work for Classics Illustrated (with collaborators David Heames and Ann Brewster also credited) retaining his creative panel layouts and combining them with even more densely detailed drawing. Webb drew The Hawk: a swashbuckling companion feature to Sheena, and much of his C. I. work revolved around stories from the Age of Sail: Two Years Before the Mast, The Dark Frigate, Kidnapped and Mysterious Island.
One of his finest adaptations was of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: from the opening illustration of ghastly clutching at a tattered manuscript to the closing scenes of the monster drifting away into the Arctic wastes, Webb captured this19th-century tale of Gothic horror wich great skill and fidelity.
Everett Raymond Kinstler garnished some notoriety as portrait painter but he acknowledges his earlier career drawing bad jungle and sci-fi comics in his best Alex Raymond knock-off style.
Far superior to that was the art he did for the Classics Illustrated adjunct history/science series, The World Around Us, in which he drew everything from Crusader knights besieging Nicaca to U-boats sinking WWI shipping. Kinstler worked in a very crisp, illustrational style that was quite good. His stories in the history of the Marines book are probably my favorites. In fact, the various C.I. titles are full of interesting surprises. One can find a nice Graham (Chastly) Ingels illustrated tale of the pirate Blackbeard or an Angelo Torres science feature about a trip to Mars. One should not overlook George Woodbridge's great adaptation of With Fire and Sword about the Polish-Cossack wars of the 17th century.

(Lou Cameron, Robert H. Webb
og andre Gilberton-tegnere får
disse ord med på vejen i artiklen
They Shall Not Be Forgotten
af Greg Cwiklik
i Comics Journal #226/2000)