Rodrigo Baeza

Early this year, Heritage Auctions' weekly comics news newsletter included a brief article titled "The Mysterious Letterer of Hero for Hire #1", referring to a credit in that issue for someone named Skip Kohloff.

The article mentioned that there were no other Marvel comics credits for Kohloff, and that it seemed he wasn't remembered by people who worked there at the time.

Quoting from the newsletter:

Having a decent comic Rolodex here at Heritage, we reached out to one of the Marvel Bullpen's leading lights of that era to find out more, but alas, said gent had no recollection of Mr. Kohloff. We also asked an ace letterer of our acquaintance (who was not on staff at Marvel) who also did not know this name but offered that he may have been a friend of the inker, or a letterer of comic strips who was given this job as a tryout.

I reached to Roy Thomas in case he had more info: he didn't remember Kohloff but speculated that he "probably knew someone in the Bullpen".

Trying to find out more about him, my first lead was a mention in the Grand Comics Database thanks to Dark Horse's crediting Kohloff as a letterer in their reprint of Burne Hogarth's 1976 graphic novel, Jungle Tales of Tarzan.

The source of this credit in the original 1976 printing of this book (published by Watson-Guptill Publications) is Burne Hogarth mentioning Kohloff in the "Acknowledgments" section of the book: "and finally Skip Kohloff, for his esprit and unstinting efforts in producing the carefully hand-lettered texts of Tarzan books, I and II".

(Hogarth's reference to "Books I and II" in this context refers to the first two chapters of Hogarth's comic adaptation: the book is divided in four sections, labeled Books I to IV.)

Even though the lettering closely follows Hogarth's own style, you can still see a resemblance with the lettering in Hero for Hire #1, done only a few years before.

My search for further information about Kohloff led me to several references and an obituary for a teacher and photographer named R. Skip Kohloff. Was this the same person as the letterer of the previous works? This person had studied at the at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York (which at least placed him in the general area of Marvel's and Watson-Guptill Publications's offices) and arrived with his wife "in Denver from Rochester, NY in 1977".

An archive of R. Skip Kohloff's papers at the University of Iowa confirmed that this was the same person who had done lettering work for Marvel and Burne Hogarth. The archive is understandably mostly devoted to the photographic work he did over three decades, but it also includes a section labeled "Comics" that contains a copy of Hero for Hire #1, "lettered by R. Skip Kohloff".

I was intrigued by the mention of "Big Ben Bolt" strips from 1975 in Kohloff's belongings. The listing doesn't detail which strips are included in the archive, but I found scans of strips from that year (unsigned, but apparently ghosted by John Celardo) which seem to have been lettered by Skip Kohloff: the style is quite similar to the "Hero for Hire" lettering.

Rupert Jenkins's obituary for Kohloff mentions that he lived in Colorado for the rest of his life, dying in 2020. It seems safe to assume that he did no comics work after leaving New York in 1977, but it's still possible that he may have done other lettering for newspaper comic strips before that year.

"The Life of James J. Walker" (1927): original art gifted to New York City Mayor James J. Walker at The Cartoonists of America dinner on March, 18, 1927.