Louis Kenneth Fine (November 26, 1914 – July 24, 1971) was an American comic book artist known for his work during the 1940s Golden Age of comic books, where his draftsmanship became an influential model to a generation of fellow comics artists. Biography Early life and career Lou Fine was born to a Jewish family in either the Manhattan or Brooklyn boroughs of New York City, the son of a house painter, Meyer, who was possibly a Russian immigrant. Fine's mother died while Fine was attending Cooper Union college, studying engineering. He had an older brother, Sam, who died in October 2000, at age 86, and a sister. According to Fine's son Elliot, Lou Fine's family lived in the Brooklyn neighborhood of "East New York, which was called Brownsville in those days.... It was a tenement Jewish neighborhood back then". Either at about age two or in his early teens, Fine's left leg became crippled by polio. Developing a talent for art, and influenced by such commercial illustrators and other artists as Dean Cornwell, Heinrich Kley, and J.C. Leyendecker, Fine went on to study at Manhattan's Grand Central Art School and Brooklyn's Pratt Institute. In 1938, Fine, like many other comics artists of the time, found work at Eisner & Iger, a prominent "packager" that supplied complete comic books to publishers testing the emerging medium. Fine's first published comics art was the strip "Wilton of the West" in Fiction House's Jumbo Comics #4 (Dec. 1938), signed with the house pen name Fred Sande (which strip originator Jack Kirby had used in previous issues). Other early pseudonyms Fine employed (reflecting the fledgling Eisner & Iger's attempts to convince publishers they had a large stable of artists) were Curt Davis and Basil Berold. Eisner would later say, "I had respect for his towering kind of draftsmanship. He was the epitome of the honest draftsman. No fakery, no razzle-dazzle — very direct, very honest in his approach". Fine went on to do exquisite and acclaimed work for Fox Feature Syndicate, where he supplied the cover of 1939's Blue Beetle #1 and drew such features as "The Flame" in Wonderworld Comics and the later eponymous series. For publisher Everett M. "Busy" Arnold's Quality Comics, he drew features including "The Black Condor" (initially under the pseudonym Kenneth Lewis) in Crack Comics; "Doll Man" (under the pseudonym William Erwin Maxwell) in Feature Comics; "The Ray" (initially