First Fandom member Edward Daniel Cartier was born in North Bergen, New Jersey, and graduated with a three-year certificate from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1936.  He served in World War II and was severely wounded in the Battle of the Bulge.  Cartier returned to the United States and again attended the Pratt Institute, this time on the G.I. Bill.  He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Pratt in 1953.  Cartier was awarded the L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future (Special Golden Age) Award in 1989; was a First Fandom Hall of Fame recipient in 1990; and won a World Fantasy Award (Life Achievement) in 1992.

Cartier was one of the most influential artists in the SF and fantasy pulp magazines of the Golden Age, bringing the fantastic characters of Unknown (later Unknown Worlds) to life.  He illustrated the lead novel in the first issue of Unknown, provided hundreds of illustrations for The Shadow and Doc Savage, and was a mainstay of Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction--another Street and Smith Publication--during the 1940s and 1950s.  His first SF cover art was for the December 1939 issue of Unknown.  Cartier did four other cover paintings during Unknown’s 39-issue run, and illustrated three subsequent publications that reprinted stories from the magazine: From Unknown Worlds (1948), The Unknown (1963), and The Unknown Five (1964).  In addition, he did the cover art for Stefan Dziemianowicz’s The Annotated Guide to Unknown and Unknown Worlds, published in 1991.  During the late 1940s Cartier did artwork for two of Street and Smith’s comic books, Shadow Comics and Red Dragon Comics, and in the early 1950s also contributed artwork to Harvey Publications.  He also became the leading cover and interior artist for the emerging small press field in the late 1940s-early 1950s, especially Fantasy Press and Gnome Press, as these publishers began reprinting in book form stories that had appeared in the leading SF pulp magazines.  He illustrated Gnome Press Calendars in 1949, 1950, and 1952; and furnished four designs for Fantasy Press Bookplates in 1952.  In addition to Astounding, he did interior art for a number of other SF magazines during the 1950s, including Fantastic Adventures, Other Worlds, Universe Science Fiction, and Planet Stories.

He left the SF/fantasy field in the mid-1950s to work as a staff artist preparing flexographic art.  A portfolio of Cartier’s work, “An Artist There Was: 1939-1941,” appeared in the October 1969 issue of the fanzine Deeper Than You Think (Vol. 1, No. 3); and his artwork, along with that of Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok, was featured in Captain George’s Comic World #28.  Edd Cartier: The Known and the Unknown, a limited-edition collection of his black and white SF/fantasy art, edited by Edd's son, Dean Cartier, was published by Gerry de la Ree in 1977.  In 1998 Cartier’s original oil painting for the cover of the December 1939 issue of Unknown sold for $35,000.

In his comprehensive reference work, A Biographical Dictionary of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists, First Fandom member Robert Weinberg wrote: “Cartier was the first science fiction artist to demonstrate that there was a place for humorous illustration in the field, and in this he set the standard by which all others were to be judged.”