Alvin Hollingsworth

Alvin C. Hollingsworth (February 25, 1928 – July 14, 2000), whose pseudonyms included Alvin Holly, and began drawing at age 4. By 12 he was an art assistant on Holyoke Publishing's Cat-Man Comics. Attending The High School of Music & Art, he was a classmate of future comic book artist and editor Joe Kubert.

Circa 1941, he began illustrating for crime comics. Through the remainder of the 1940s, he confirmably drew for Holyoke's Captain Aero Comics (as Al Hollingsworth), and Fiction House's Wings Comics, where he did the feature "Suicide Smith" at least sporadically from 1946 to 1950. He is tentatively identified under the initials "A. H." as an artist on the feature "Captain Power" in Novack Publishing's Great Comics in 1945.

Hollingsworth graduated from City College of New York in 1956, Phi Beta Kappa, as a fine arts major, and earned his master's degree there in 1959. In the mid-1950s, while still a student, he worked on newspaper comic strips including Kandy (1954-1955) from the Smith-Mann Syndicate, as well as Scorchy Smith (1953-1954) An authority on fluorescent paint, he worked in both representational and abstract art. At some point during the 1960s, he directed an art program teaching young students commercial art and fine art at the Harlem Parents Committee Freedom School. Examples of Hollingsworth's work are held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Hudson River Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture, in Charlotte, North Carolina. His work is also held in numerous academic, corporate and private collections. He was living in New York's Westchester County at the time of his death on July 14, 2000, at age 72.