Alexander A. Blum

Alexander Anthony Blum was an American etcher, painter, illustrator and cartoonist. Born in Hungary, he immigrated to the United States with his family and underwent his formal art training at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Art Students League in New York. His early work comprises of paintings and detailed etching, but Blum is best remembered for the work he began producing in 1939 as an illustrator and cartoonist. The comic studio Eisner & Iger was his starting point and in 1939 his first known comic "Samson" was published by Fox Feature Syndicate. He utilized the pseudonym Alex Boon for the publication. Blum also worked for Quality Comics, Fiction House, and was one of the leading artists at Classics Illustrated, which produced comics of classic literature. He illustrated more than 25 comics for the studio, including "Treasure Island" (1949), "The Iliad" (1950), "The Jungle Book" (1951) and "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1953).

Among Blum's other pseudonyms was "Armand Budd", which he used while working for Fiction House.