Joseph Doolin (1896-1967) was a Pulp illustrator who went into comics in the 1940s. As part of the S. M. Igor shop he worked on Planet Comics, the companion comic to Planet Stories. It isn’t surprising that Fiction House, that owned both publications would want a strong similarity between them. Doolin accomplished this by swiping cover elements for the comic books.
These swipes weren’t done out of lack of talent. Doolin drew some of the best illustrations at Weird Tales and other Pulps like this one for Seabury Quinn’s The Devil’s Bride (1932). The publisher Thurman T. Scott insisted on them as part of his mania for the perfect formula cover to boost sales. Why Doolin was singled out for this I don’t know.
All comic book covers by Joseph Doolin.
The 1949 cover is interesting in that the comic book version was published first. That doesn’t mean Anderson didn’t paint it months previous. That Doolin had access to the cover is not hard to imagine.
