Alvin Hollingsworth

Alvin Hollingsworth
Alvin Hollingsworth
Born	(1928-02-25)February 25, 1928 Harlem New York City, New York
Died	July 14, 2000(2000-07-14) (aged 72)
Occupation	Comic-book artist, painter, art professor
Known for	One of comics' first African-American artists

Alvin C. Hollingsworth (25 February 1928 – July 14, 2000), whose pseudonyms included Alvin Holly, was an African-American painter and one of the first Black artists in comic books.

Alvin Carl Hollingsworth was born in Harlem, New York City, New York, of West Indian parents, and began drawing at age 4. By 12 he was an art assistant on Holyoke Publishing's Cat-Man Comics. Attending The High School of Music & Art, he was a classmate of future comic book artist and editor Joe Kubert.

Circa 1941, he began illustrating for crime comics. Since it was not standard practice during this era for comic-book credits to be given routinely, comprehensive credits are difficult to ascertain; Hollingsworth's first confirmed comic-book work is the signed, four-page war comics story "Robot Plane" in Aviation Press' Contact Comics #5 (cover-dated March 1945), which he both penciled and inked. Through the remainder of the 1940s, he confirmably drew for Holyoke's Captain Aero Comics (as Al Hollingsworth), and Fiction House's Wings Comics, where he did the feature "Suicide Smith" at least sporadically from 1946 to 1950. He is tentatively identified under the initials "A. H." as an artist on the feature "Captain Power" in Novack Publishing's Great Comics in 1945.

In the following decade, credited as Alvin Hollingsworth or A. C. Hollingsworth, he drew for a number of publishers and series, including Avon Comics' and later Superior Publishers Limited's The Mask of Dr. Fu Manchu; Premier Magazines' Police Against Crime; Ribage's romance comic Youthful Romances; and horror comics such as Master Comics' Dark Mysteries and Trojan Magazines' Beware. As Al Hollingsworth, he drew for horror comics including Avon's Witchcraft, "Strange Worlds", "Eerie" and Premier's Mysterious Stories, and romance comics such as Lev Gleason Publications' Boy Loves Girl. One standard source credits him, without specification, as an artist on stories for Fox Comics (the feature "Numa" in Rulah, Jungle Goddess, and "Bronze Man' in Blue Beetle) and on war stories for the publisher Spotlight.