strip ever created". In 1949, Eisner, in his sideline as a comics packager, created the feature "Secret Files of Dr. Drew" for Fiction House. Grandenetti said Eisner instructed him to draw it "in the Eisner style. Which I did, badly. Anyway, after a couple of stories I began to do my own thing". The eight-page story "The Strange Case of the Absent Floor" in Rangers Comics #47 (June 1949), which he both penciled and inked, marked Grandenetti's first credited comics art, and he remained on the feature (scripted by Eisner's office manager and future journalist Marilyn Mercer) through #60 (Aug. 1951). Grandenetti also drew "Senorita Rio" stories for the same publisher's Fight Comics. After doing a small amount of work for Lev Gleason Publications' Boy Comics #52 (April 1960), Media's Mister Universe #1 (July 1951), American Comics Group's Adventures into the Unknown #22 (Aug. 1951), and Prize Comics' Black Magic vol. 2, #3 (Feb. 1952), Grandenetti began his 17-year run at DC Comics. DC Comics At DC, then the leading comic-book company and the home of Batman and Superman, Grandenetti drew some of everything that was not a superhero. Beginning with Western Comics #27 (Sept. 1951), Grandenetti did Western comics (All-Star Western), crime fiction (Racket Squad in Action, Gang Busters, Mr. District Attorney), science fiction (Strange Adventures), and mystery-suspense (House of Mystery), but made his mark as one of DC's signature war comics artists, drawing hundreds of anthological stories and covers in a dozen years' worth of such titles as All-American Men of War, G.I. Combat, Our Army at War, Our Fighting Forces, and Star Spangled War Stories. DC war-comics editor and writer Robert Kanigher recalled that on the feature "Gunner and Sarge" in particular, Grandenetti "managed to get the grime and the humor of the two Marines (and, eventually their wonderful Pooch) fighting in the jungle as no one else could. Jerry liked to experiment and I had to sit on him to get him to stop it. Especially in his covers, which were outstanding, when I forced him to draw as realistically as possible". With Kanigher, Grandenetti co-created the feature "Mlle. Marie", about a World War II French Resistance fighter, in Star Spangled War Stories #84 (Aug. 1959). Grandenetti became known for cover art rendered in wash-tone, also known as grey-tone, which, as comics-art historian Don Mangus describes, "is executed as an ink-wash drawing, and then a halftone