S. Ruth Lubka - Firebird

2004 Illustrators Night - Barnes and Noble, Clark, NJ
This covers is a favorite, because it does not represent the usual comic book artist, instead the drawing is from a children's book illustrator and writer who only published the one book "Pupniks" before her untimely death.

S. Ruth Lubka (1948- 2007) received a B.A. degree in Art History and graduated Cum Laude with Honors in her major at Barnard College in New York City. She did graduate studies in Jewish Art and Material Culture at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City. She received a J.D. from the University of Connecticut School of Law. She was a former Deputy Chief Staff Attorney for the Connecticut Supreme and Appellate Courts in Hartford. Arad Artists Program Artist-in-Residence, WUJS, Arad, Israel, 1994-95.

Wrote and illustrated the children's book "PUPNIKS: The Story of Two Space Dogs", Marshall Cavendish Children's Books (New York, NY), 2003.

Honors Awards: Manekin Family Fellowship, and Cutler art fellowship, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1998-99; Best Book, Bank Street College, NY, 2003, for PUPNIKS.

In Slavic folklore, the typical role of the Firebird is an object of a difficult quest. The quest is usually initiated by finding a lost tail feather, at which point the hero sets out to find and capture the live bird. In the book Pupniks, Ms. Lubka features the Firebird as a starting point to the quest for space travel.

“The secrets of my childhood gave birth to a passion for knowing what existed beyond the world around me. And in the late 1950s and the decade that followed, my passion for understanding the unknown found a new, brighter focus: space exploration. Of all the space explorers of that time, none appealed to me more than the four-legged, tail-wagging variety. 'What did they think?' I asked myself. 'Did they realize they were in outer space?” biography.jrank.org

Comments

Mike Rhode said…
Wow, what a great idea. I saw your blog linked from Ryan Claytor's site and I'm totally envious of your collection already. Here's my blog post about it - http://cartoonphilately.blogspot.com/2010/08/ryan-claytor-on-cool-first-day-cover.html