There were three inkers who worked upon the first appearance of the Justice League in Brave and the Bold #28 – Bernard Sachs, Joe Giella, and Murphy Anderson. Anderson and Giella inked the Flash and Green Lantern chapters, but it was Sachs who inked the rest of the book and was the inker on the regular series.
Bernard Sachs
- First Appearance: Silver Streak Comics #11 (June 1941)
- Occupation: Inker of comic books, advertising animator
- Claim to fame: Last JSA inker, first JLA inker.
- Creator of: Inked the first appearances of Adam Strange and the Justice League
- Homage: The source of the most expensive Roy Lichtenstein swipe ever sold.
Bernard Sachs has the distinction of being the last inker on the Justice Society’s original run and the first inker of the new Justice League. He was a prolific inker who brought a polished and clean, if not particularly dramatic, line to his work.
Early Comics Work
Cover to Airboy Comics #10 drawn and inked by Sachs.Bernard Sachs was one of the legion of early comic book professionals who toiled away to produce our pop-art masterpieces, but of whom we know very little personal information. He may have been born in 1921 [1]. Julius Schwartz mentions visiting with Sachs and his wife Bernice who lived nearby to him [2]. He eventually left the field in the mid-1960s for an animation job with a large advertising agency before retiring in 1986 [3]. He passed away in 1998 [3].
Like his personal background, Bernard Sachs’ early comic book credits can be fragmentary, but the first work by him listed in the GCD is as a penciller on the “Dan Dearborn” feature in Lev Gleason’s Silver Streak Comics #11 (June 1941). He then pencils the “Espionage for X” feature in Quality’s Smash Comics #43-48 and #50 (June 1943 to Feb 1944). He reappears in 1946/47 on various features in various volumes of Airboy Comics for Hillman Comics either on his own or, quite often, inking the work of penciller Arthur Peddy on the “Heap”.