Pulp Illustrator
Born in Cincinnati, Ingels began working at age 14 after the death of his father, commercial artist Don Ingels, Graham was 16 when he entered the art field drawing theater displays. He studied at New York's Hawthorne School of Art.
Graham and Gertrude Ingels married when he was starting as a freelancer at age 20. He entered the Navy in 1943, and he began working that same year for Fiction House Publications, both in their pulp magazines and their comic book division. Black and white illustrations signed G. Ingels appeared in Planet Stories, Jungle Stories, North-West Romances and Wings. He contributed one painted cover to a 1944 issue of Planet Stories as well. For Planet Comics, he illustrated stories in the "Hunt Bowman" series and the "Aura, Lord of Jupiter" series. He also painted a mural at the United Nations building.
The Ingels had two children, Deanna (born 1937) and Robby (born 1946), who was named after a character created by child impersonator Lenore Ledoux for the Baby Snooks radio program. Artist Howard Nostrand, a friend of Ingels, recalled:
- Robby was short for Robespierre. The reason why they called him that was left over from the old Fanny Brice show, Baby Snooks. Baby Snooks had a little kid brother named Robespierre. They called him that when he was a little kid, and the name stuck.
A regular in Planet Comics and Rangers Comics in the late 1940s, Ingels worked for Magazine Enterprises and other publishers of comic books and pulps. He became an art director at Better Publications (Ned Pine's Comics Group later known as Nedor), where he gave early comic book assignments to George Evans, with whom he would form a long friendship, and a young Frank Frazetta, who credited Ingels as the first in the business to recognize his talent. During this period, Ingels created covers and stories for the company's Startling Comics and Wonder Comics; these and other Better Publications comics reveal certain panels by other artists have been redrawn by Ingels to improve the artwork.
Ingels drew crime comics for Magazine Enterprises (Manhunt, Killers) and Westerns for a variety of companies, including Magazine Enterprises (Guns), Youthful Magazines (Gunsmoke), Hillman Periodicals (Western Fighters) and D.S. Publishing Co. (Outlaws). D.S. also published crime stories drawn by Ingels in Underworld, Gangsters Can't Win and Exposed. There were also short stories and one painted cover by Ingels in Dell Comics' Heroic Comics around 1947.
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Famous quotes containing the word pulp:
“He wrote me sad Mother’s Day stories. He’d always kill me in the stories and tell me how bad he felt about it. It was enough to bring a tear to a mother’s eye.”
—Connie Zastoupil, U.S. mother of Quentin Tarantino, director of film Pulp Fiction. Rolling Stone, p. 76 (December 29, 1994)