Rubeny (Ruben Yandoc) artwork, House of Mystery #248

DC Comics, December 1976

Rubeny art was a mainstay of mid-1970s mystery comics at DC. His work stood out because of his advanced 'cartoony' embellishing style in a field of more realistically-inclined artists then dominating the DC horror books.

Take a look at the last panel on this page: notice the man's collarbone impossibly arrayed into his neck (instead of connecting to his shoulder). Rubeny used distortion to trump any other concern when making a panel fit his story telling style, whether it was anatomy or visual perspective, it was all bendable when making the outline of the shapes of the characters telling the tale (here written by Jack Oleck) fit.

Rubeny used a stock collection of types that he drew and redrew from story to story. The blonde girl and blonde man in this tale show up in other rubeny-drawn tales, almost like stock actors in a long-running TV series, where a particular kind of face and voice plays a variety of characters in varying stories over the length of several seasons. (This makes sense in that it was the same group of writers penning the stories, and they often were variations on the same "O Henry" twist endings, over and over.) Rubeny had a catalog of certain expressions and body reactions which he used from tale to tale, and effective heavy inking to imply the ominous purposes belonging to the ever-present story villains.

See another Rubeny page from House of Mystery #209, December 1972