Early comics career (1946–1960)
Rosenberger had done a bit of work for Dell Comics before the war. He started comics work again in 1946, and by 1949 he was working entirely freelance. He had left his job at the gallery in April 1948, and was soon working on crime, western, adventure, and romance stories for several different publishers.
Robert Bernstein was a writer Rosenberger met while drawing for Brevity, Inc., a company which produced industrial, political, and educational comics in booklet form. The pair pitched an original serial newspaper strip called Sands of the South Seas a couple of years later. The proposal resulted in the publication of one issue of a comic book (retitled Sands of the South Pacific) by Toby Press. Future newspaper strip pitches were less successful, with both Christopher Crown (1959) and Chris Cross (1965) rejected by the syndicates, but the two would become frequent creative collaborators on other projects.
Other work came for Rosenberger in the form of painted covers for paperback book publishers. With his background in oil painting, this kind of work was less stressful than comics jobs, which proved to be a great pressure for him. Indeed, Rosenberger suffered a nervous breakdown in 1952, after which the family temporarily moved to a small town in Connecticut. He soon resumed working on the paperback covers, but was hesitant in going back to work for comics.
His reentry into regular comics work was facilitated by friendly encouragement from Richard E. Hughes, editor for the American Comics Group (ACG). After about a year in Connecticut, in which the Rosenbergers went deep into debt, John signed on for work with ACG and the family moved to Levittown, Long Island, close to their new good friends the Hugheses.
While there was some work from Dell-affiliated Custom Comics (which produced educational pamphlets), work with Brevity, Inc. ended when its owner unexpectedly died in 1953. There was a dispute over royalties and a failed attempt by Rosenberger and Bernstein to buy the company, but nothing came of it, leaving ACG as Rosenberger's biggest account for the mid- to late-1950s. He covered all genres for ACG, and worked in all the company's titles in some part through the mid-1960s, including Adventures into the Unknown, Forbidden Worlds, Unknown Worlds, and Romantic Adventures,[4] all of which had managed to survive the implementation of the Comics Code Authority in 1954.
