Scorchy Smith sunday 1954

Alvin Hollingsworth was an Afro-American comic book artist, active in the field during the 1940s and 1950s. Born in New York City, he was a high school classmate of Joe Kubert's at the High School of Music and Art. By the age of twelve, he was working as an assistant at Holyoke Publishing Company and helped on Catman Comics. A year later he began doing illustrations for crime comics. Hollingsworth drew for several companies until the mid-1950s, including Fox ('Bronze Man', 'Rulah Jungle Goddess'), Fiction House ('Suicide Smith'), Feature Comics (romance), Spotlight (war), Story Comics (crime) and Trojan (crime and romance). In the mid-1950s, he worked on newspaper comics like 'Kandy' (Smith-Mann Syndicate), 'Scorchy Smith' (Associated Press) and 'Martin Keel' (with George Shedd). Hollingsworth left the comic strip field to pursue a career in the world of fine art. His later work often used themes like civil rights, as well as jazz and dance. He was active in the Civil Rights Movement with art exhibitions. He was an art teacher with Hostos Community College in New York from 1980 until his retirement in 1998. Text (c) Lambiek