order to see publishers. Kubert began honing his craft at the Chesler studio, one of the comic-book packagers that had sprung up in the medium's early days to supply outsourced comics to publishers. Career Early career Kubert's first known professional job was penciling and inking the six-page story "Black-Out", starring the character Volton, in Holyoke Publishing's Catman Comics #8 (March 1942; also listed as vol. 2, #13). He would continue drawing the feature for the next three issues, and was soon doing similar work for Fox Comics' Blue Beetle. Branching into additional art skills, he began coloring the Quality Comics reprints of future industry legend Will Eisner's The Spirit, a seven-page comics feature that originally ran as part of a newspaper Sunday supplement. 1940s and 1950s Kubert's first work for DC Comics, where he would spend much of his career and produce some of his most notable art, was penciling and inking the 50-page "Seven Soldiers of Victory" superhero-team story in Leading Comics #8 (Fall 1943), published by a DC predecessor company, All-American Publications. Throughout the decade, Kubert's art would appear in comics from Fiction House, Avon, and Harvey Comics, but he otherwise worked exclusively for All-American and DC. Kubert's long association with the Hawkman character began with the story "A Hot Time in the Old Town" in The Big All-American Comic Book (1944). Kubert drew several Hawkman stories in that title as well as in All Star Comics. He and Irwin Hasen drew the debut of the Injustice Society in All Star Comics #37 (Oct. 1947) in a tale written by Robert Kanigher. The Kanigher/Kubert team created the Thorn in Flash Comics #89 (Nov. 1947). In the 1950s, he became managing editor of St. John Publications, where he, his old classmate Norman Maurer, and Norman's brother Leonard Maurer produced the first 3-D comic books, starting with Three Dimension Comics #1 (Sept. 1953 oversize format, Oct. 1953 standard-size reprint), featuring Mighty Mouse. According to Kubert, it sold a remarkable 1.2 million copies at 25 cents apiece at a time when comics cost a dime. At St. John, writer Norman Maurer and artist Kubert created the enduring character Tor, a prehistoric-human protagonist who debuted in the comic 1,000,000 Years Ago (Sept. 1953). Tor immediately went on to star in 3-D Comics #2-3 (Oct.-Nov. 1953), followed by a titular, traditionally 2-D comic-book series, written and drawn by Joe Kubert, that premiered with