The industry peaked in size sometime in the 50s, but it was more quantity than quality. While at the top you had superstars like Rockwell, Layendecker and Artsy

The industry peaked in size sometime in the 50s, but it was more quantity than quality. While at the top you had superstars like Rockwell, Layendecker and Artsybashef, you also had massive industrial scale illustration houses hiring kids out of high school and training them up quickly to produce stylistically rigid and uniform illustration work at scale and for low pay. It wasn't a whole lot different than the way the Animation and video game industry works today.