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Top Five Golden Age Artists

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Ami_GFX:
There were so many good artists in the golden age, it is indeed hard to put just 5 at the top but I would definitely put Eisner and Kirby and Cole in the group not just due the high quality of their own work but because they influenced others so much and brought up the overall quality of golden age comics immensely. They brought such things as very well done and stylistic spash panels into comics and in no time at all, the flat and simplistic artwork of the early golden age--1936-1941 more or less--blossumed into a dazzling array of form and style.

Salty:
Any discussion of top Golden Age artists ought to include Hal Foster, Alex Raymond & Burne Hogarth even though they came out of the strips, because those three were so influential upon Adventure comics art in general.
It's impossible not to include the likes of Windsor McCay, Carl Barks, EC Segar, VT Hamlin, Walt Kelly and George McManus in this discussion...
If we're talking 30s-50s as defining Golden Age, because Eisner, Fine, Kirby, Crandall, Schomberg, Wolverton, the EC crowd, Maneely, Powell, Kubert, Heath and a TON of others all have and deserve their adherents.  Top FIVE?  JVJ had 10 in his top 5, but I'm inclined to list 50.

Anyway, it's the less known guys that get me excited--who here knows Sid Check? (Harvey, Atlas horror) Everett Raymond Kinstler? (Avon) I'm fond of Howard Nostrand (Harvey), Jay Disbrow (Fiction House, Star), Mort Lawrence (Atlas)...and with the wonderful and diverse selection of material at DCM to investigate, I'll be adding names to THAT list for some time to come!   
My apologies if I've frayed my end of this thread by listing too many Names.     

narfstar:
Can' forget Fujitani one of the guys I really like

kusunoki:
Man, I think I shot myself in the foot with this whole stop at 5 thing. I subconsciously buried the guys I identify with EC, as none of that is up on the site; but that made me overlook two of my all-time faves: Bernie Krigstein and Johnny Craig. Krigstein's work is simply unbelievable. While I love all of the wide range of styles I've seen him apply to stories, it is the best of his EC work that I think represents his finest work (and some of the finest comics work I've ever seen). The celebrated "Master Race" deserves its reputation, but I think the less well-known stories "Key Chain" and "'Till Death Do Us Part" are every bit as good. Unlike Krigstein, I don't think I have ever seen any pre-1960s non-EC work by Craig, but his stuff in Crime Suspenstories, Vault of Horror, and then all over the New Direction books just blows me away. I had thought that Craig's work was criminally overlooked, but I have seen comments here and there in the last few years that suggests that there is a great deal of appreciation for him out there.

Well, it looks like the top 5 theme was a bit of a bust, but in its defense, I actually saw it as a bit of a desert island thought experiment deal. Thinking in terms of what I might have put in, I realized that, while I like the work of artists like Russ Heath, Joe Maneely, and Bill Everett a great deal, if I had to really think about it, I didn't like their work as much as that of the artists I put on my original list. Oh well, despite the failings of the original theme, it seems to have spawned an interesting discussion of artists.

Glad to see so much love for Meskin, too ;)

Poztron:
If I modify this from "top five" to favorite five, my list would probably include Simon-Kirby (I'll count them as a unit), Eisner (though the Eisner shop art really varied in quality when Eisner wasn't directly involved), Klaus Nordling (Lady Luck and the Barker), Matt Baker (though I now realize that half of the stuff I always thought was Baker's work was probably Iger shop work with guys _doing_ Baker's style), and Rudy Palais (some really over the top stuff, especially in the horror comics). This leaves out many of my other favorites (Severin, Heath, pretty much all the top EC artists, the women artists who worked for Fiction House, Meskin yes, several St. John artists, and the list could go on and on.) I'm not especially into super-heroes, so my list is a bit thin on the artists who are most noted for those.

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