Frank Frazetta "Brothers of the Wilderness"
From Durango Kid #4 or the White Indian compilation issue from Magazine Enterprises in 1953
The White Indian series was a perfect fit for Frazetta's skills. Besides needing to draw naked male torsos in an endless series of athletic maneuvers, Frazetta was also given the duty by the outdoors setting of the tale for drawing a variety of trees. He seemed to enjoy this nearly as much as the musculature of the human body.
Frazetta's sense of backgrounding in these stories is something he eventually carried over and refined for his famous paperback book covers of the sixties. Background spaces are stylized or nonexistent, which seems to fit with Frazetta's developing credo of not creating distractions away from his main point, which is almost always some expression being made by a foreground human body.
The lightly rendered lines designating the distant mountain range in the first panel is an effect Frazetta used many times later, a minimally rendered image providing minimum distraction but still providing needed geography. The stylized mountain is reminiscent of classic illustrator techniques of artists like Howard Pyle, Hal Foster and Robert Lawson.
