"I really liked him."

Those were Vic Dowd's concluding words about his long-lost friend, illustrator Jack Hearne, when Dowd was being interviewed for issue #55 of Alter Ego magazine by Jim Amash.

I didn't realize it at the time, but I had really liked Jack Hearne's art as a 10-year old kid back in 1974. It was only after I started researching the illustrator on-line that I discovered Hearne had taken over the art chores on what was then my favourite book series, Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, with volume 18, "The Mystery of the Shrinking House".

Hearne was the third artist to do cover and interior art for the series, following Ed Vebell and Harry Kane .
I had been devouring the series from the first volume and at that age was completely unaware that the art chores had changed hands - infact, I was completely oblivious to the concept that someone had the job of illustrating (or writing, for that matter), the books just "were" - and I just loved 'em!

Its nice to know that one of the first "real" illustrators I was ever exposed to and who's work I admired was also someone Vic Dowd describes as "a very good illustrator" and "a very nice guy."

*All of this week's images can be seen at full size in my Jack Hearne Flickr set.

"You remember Argosy?"

In his Alter Ego interview, Vic Dowd, speaking of his friend Jack Hearne, asks Jim Amash, "You remember Argosy? Well he [Jack Hearne] was working for the Argosy knock-offs, though I don't remember the names of them."

Dowd is talking about the period shortly after WW II and eventually lost track of his friend when Hearne moved away. Though Hearne must have done work for what Dowd calls "the cheaper men's magazines" around that time he did in fact graduate to being an Argosy contributor by the late 50's.

Yesterday a reader commented that Hearne's style had a powerful macho quality to it and no doubt that quality earned him the assignments first from the Argosy imitators and ultimately from the magazine itself.