Sometimes, when I’m doing these artist profiles, I can find a lot of information about an artist online and sometimes, I can’t. In the case of George Erickson, most of the information that I found was about a retired dentist and world traveler who just happened to have the same name as the artist. I also found plenty of information about an illustrator named George Ericson, who usually his signed his work, “Eugene Iverd.” (A story in the Saturday Evening Post states that he spelled his last name Erickson while Wikipedia spells it without the K.) Unfortunately, that George Ericson died in 1936 and the covers below were obviously painted in the 1950s. I don’t know if our George Erickson was related to Ericson/Iverd or if the similarity of their names is just a coincidence. Beyond his work, the only definite thing that I found out about our George Erickson is that he was born in 1924.
Unlike a lot of artists of the pulp era, it appears that George Erickson regularly signed his name to his work, so at least we can definitely identify which covers were done by him. Below is a small sampling of his work. My favorites are The American Dream Girl, The Crooked Man, Like Wild, I’ll Bury My Dead, and A Hero Of Our Time, even if the “hero” looks like he’s being more of a pest than a hero.
Through the Shattered Lens 