Jim Mooney
Jim Mooney (born 1919) is an American comic book artist best known as a Marvel Comics inker and Spider-Man artist, and as the signature artist of DC Comics' Silver Age Supergirl.
Early life and career
After attending art school, Mooney, circa 1941, left Hollywood, California to enter the fledging, New York City-based comic-book industry. Following his first assignment, the feature "Moth" in Fox Publications' Mystery Men Comics, he worked for the comic-book packager Eisner & Iger, the studio of Golden Age greats Will Eisner and Jerry Iger. He left voluntarily after two weeks: "I was just absolutely crestfallen when I looked at some of the guys’ work. Lou Fine was working there, Nick Cardy (but at that time it was Nick Viscardy [sic]), and on and on, and Eisner himself. I was beginning to feel that I was way, way in beyond my depth...." [1]
Mooney went on staff at Fiction House for approximately nine months, working on feature including "Camilla" and "Suicide Smith" and becoming friends with colleagues George Tuska, Ruben Moreira (a future Tarzan comic-strip artist), and Cardy. He began freelancing for Timely Comics, the 1940s predecessor of Marvel, on that company's "animation" comics of funny animal and movie-cartoon tie-in comics. He also wrote and drew a funny-animal feature, "Perky Penguin and Booby Bear", in 1946 and 1947 for Treasure Chest, the Catholic-oriented comic book distributed in parochial schools.
Supergirl and the DC years
Mooney then began a 22-year association with the company that would evolve into DC. From 1946 to 1968, he drew for such titles as Batman and Superboy and such features as "Dial H For Hero" in House of Mystery and "Tommy Tomorrow" in Action Comics and World's Finest Comics, and, most notably, the backup feature "Supergirl" in Action Comics. (He also contributed to Atlas Comics, the 1950s iteration of Marvel, on at least a handful of 1953-54 issues of Lorna the Jungle Queen.)
By the late 1960s, Mooney recalled, DC was "getting into the illustrative type of art then, primarily Neal Adams, and they wanted to go in that direction. Towards the end there I picked up on it and I think my later Supergirl was quite illustrative, but not quite what they wanted. I knew the handwriting was on the wall, so I was looking around.... The reason I hadn’t worked at Marvel for all those years was because they didn’t pay as well as DC. ... I think at that time [it] was $30 [a page] when I was getting closer to $50 at DC." [2]
Spider-Man and Marvel
By now, however, the rates were closer, and Mooney jumped ship. Marvel editor Stan Lee had him work with The Amazing Spider-Man penciler John Romita. Mooney would go on to ink a classic run of Amazing Spider-Man (#65, 67-88; Oct. 1968, Dec. 1968-Sept. 1970), which he recalled as "finalising it over John’s layouts" [3]. Mooney, who combined a slick, polished line with a down-to-earth, Everyman feel, also embellished John Buscema's pencils on many issues of The Mighty Thor.
As a penciler, Mooney did several issues of Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man, we well as Spider-Man stories in Marvel Team-Up, and he both penciled and inked issues of writer Steve Gerber's Man-Thing and the entire 10-issue run of Gerber's cult-hit Omega the Unknown, among many other titles.
Mooney left Marvel in the late 1980s to semi-retire in Florida, where he has since worked on Star Rangers with Mark Ellis and Anne Rice's The Mummy for Millennium Publications, Soul Searchers, an Elvira comic book for Claypool Comics, a retro "Lady Supreme" story for Awesome Entertainment, and commissioned pieces.