Keats Petree

Who was Keats Petree?

Keats E. Petree was a prolific American illustrative artist with significant contributions to both pulp magazines and comic strips in the 1940s and 1950s. His works were primarily in color, as inked strips and both oil and watercolor paintings. Petree's most memorable comic book credits were for the later comic versions of Sally the Sleuth, a pulp comic strip heroine created originally by Adolphe Barreaux in 1934 in Spicy Detective Stories, but his greatest recognition was earned by his pulp color work for the Queenie Starr series, also in Spicy Detective Stories. Other notable Petree work included The Lone Ranger, Girl Friday, the Sally the Sleuth pulp installment entitled Blonde Decoy, Wilma West: The Range Runs Red, a daily strip and Sunday strip in the fifties, Nick Halliday, and a wide variety of other pulp and comic issues. He also produced an undetermined number of non-genre oil and watercolor paintings.

Late in his career Petree designed a series of promotional Limited Edition Trays for McDonald's restaurants.

Petree is profiled in Peter Haining's The Classic Era of the American Pulp Magazines and in The Artist's Bluebook: 34,000 North American Artists