Joseph Szokoli was born March 30, 1913 in New York City. His parents were Johann and Gisela Szokoli. His father was a Hungarian Jew, who immigrated in 1909. His mother, an Austrian Catholic, immigrated two years later with their first son John. They rented an apartment at 523 East 78th Street, where Joseph and his younger sister, Josephine, were born. The father was a barber, and by 1928 he was cutting hair at the Waldorf Astoria's barber shop.
In 1932 Joseph attended night classes in commercial art at Pratt Intitute in Brooklyn, where he crossed paths with many other young artists who were starting careers as pulp artists.
His first published assignments appeared in 1935. They were interior pen and ink story illustrations for Harry Donnenfeld's pulp magazines, such as Spicy Detective and Spicy Adventure Stories. He also drew a sado-erotic cartoon, Polly of the Plains, that regularly appeared in Spicy Western Magazine.
By 1940 Donnenfeld had started a comic book division, called Donnenfeld Comics, but the name was soon changed to the more anonymous, DC Comics. His Superman comic was so sensationally popular that it revolutionized the entire publishing industry. Donnenfeld offered to hire Szokoli to help draw Superman, but Szokoli turned it down in preferrence for his professional status as a magazine cover artist.
He sold freelance pulp covers to Action Stories, Double Action Western, Fighting Western, Hollywood Detective, Leading Western, Pirate Stories, Private Detective, Saucy Detective, Saucy Movie Tales, Six-Gun Western, and Super Detective.
In 1942 he reported for his WWII draft enlistment. He was hoping to qualify as a combat photographer, but he was classified 4F, because of a chronic heart problem. Nevertheless he joined the patriotic war effort by working in a defense plant during the war years.
When H.J.Ward died unexpectedly in 1945, Donnenfeld lost his top cover artist. Joseph Szokoli provided a continuity to the cover designs by creating a number of covers that resemble Ward's sensational subjects and compositions, although Szokoli's versions are distinctly recognizable, because they are painted with an airbrush. In this way he made no attempt to duplicate Ward's masterful skills as an oil painter.
During the post-war years Szokoli continued to work for Donnenfeld's pulps until the industry dried up in the early 1950s. He found some work illustrating men's adventure magazines, such as Action, Escape To Adventure, Man To Man, and SIR!
He also worked in advertising, but the trend in publishing was to replace classic illustrators with photography. Eventually Szokloi's unique talent as an airbrush artist was more valuable to the industry as a photo-retoucher than as an illustrator.
In 1954 he married his wife Elsa Szokoli, and they moved to Bayside Queens, where they built a new home and raised their daughter Maria. The marriage ended in divorce in 1960.
In 1961 he married Helen Ashbacher and they moved to Flushing Queens, where they raised their son, Joe.
The artist spent his final years working as a freelance photo-retouch artist for advertising agencies and enjoying his hobby of power boating on Flushing Bay.
Joseph Szokoli died at age 68 in June of 1981.
© David Saunders 2009 |
