Matt Baker

Clarence Matthew Baker (December 10, 1921 – August 11, 1959) was an American comic book artist and illustrator, best known for drawing early comics heroines such as the costumed crimefighter Phantom Lady, and romance comics. Active in the 1940s and 1950s Golden Age of comic books, he is one of the first known African-American artists to find success in the comic-book industry. He also penciled St. John Publications' digest-sized "picture novel" It Rhymes with Lust (1950), the first graphic novel despite that term not having been coined at the time. Baker was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2009. His influence can be seen in artists such as Dave Stevens and Adam Hughes. Biography Early years Baker was born December 10, 1921, in Forsyth County, North Carolina. At a young age he relocated with his family to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and after graduating high school in 1940, moved to Washington, D.C. Prevented by a heart condition from being drafted into the U.S. military during World War II, he began studying art at Cooper Union, in New York City. He entered comics through the Jerry Iger Studio, one of the 1930s to 1940s "packagers" that provided outsourced comics to publishers entering the new medium. Iger recalled that Baker came into his studio with a single sample of a color sketch in his portfolio; he thought the woman was so naturally beautiful that he hired Baker on the spot, as a background artist before he was given his first scripts. Baker's first confirmed comics work is penciling and inking the women in the 12-page "Sheena, Queen of the Jungle" story in Fiction House's Jumbo Comics #69 (cover-dated Nov. 1944), otherwise penciled by Robert Webb and Alex Blum.