Sourcing art for blog posts or hobby publications can be a frustrating. Public domain art is an option, but it comes with its own set of challenges. Much of what can be found easily has already been overexposed by dozens of other projects using it. Finding a piece that is both suitable for the project and will look fresh to the audience can take nearly as much time and effort as the writing itself did.
A few years ago I set out to ease this burden by scanning through public domain comic books for art that might be useful for people writing RPG blogs, or trying to publish little RPG books. In some cases I was just able to crop out the image I wanted, though for a lot of these I had to digitally repair the art in places where speech bubbles or narration covered some vital corner. It was a fun way to spend a few hours looking at art, exercising my image editing skills, and then to feel as though I'd done something useful.
Regretably, it didn't occur to me to preserve metadata at the time. It was uncommon for comic book artists to be credited during the period this art is from, so that most vital bit of information—the name of the artists—has been lost to history no matter what we do. Still, at some point I'd like to make sure each piece includes a record of which comic it was taken from. I can say for certain that much of what's below came from five publications: The April 1952 issue of Hand of Fate, the August 1951 issue of Web of Mystery, the March 1952 issue of World War III, the April 1945 issue of Red Band Comics, and a 1952 issue of Ghost Comics.
Note: I am not a lawyer, and while I have made every good faith effort to ensure all the art presented here is in the public domain according to the laws of the United States, I make no guarantees. Copyright is a labyrinthine monster beyond my reckoning.
—Nick LS Whelan
March 5, 2021