[The Australian Panther]

Crash,

Panther, you may be right that the etcher is the same Rodney Thomson

  I may well be wrong, certainly. 
Here is my reasoning.
1/ The Artist's name is clearly stated as Rodney Thompson.
The link I gave says this,

  Rodney Thomson was an American visual artist who was born in 1878. As a young man, he prospected for gold in California, and later studied art in San Francisco. He moved to New York in 1906, where he worked as an illustrator for magazines including Life and Vanity Fair. 

Wikipedia info on Centaur Publications states:-

 
Another entrepreneur, Harry "A" Chesler, published Star Comics and Star Ranger through his own Chesler Publications, each with first issues cover-dated February 1937. These titles were soon bought out by I. W. Ullman and Frank Z. Temerson's Ultem Publications. In September 1937, Ultem acquired the Comics Magazine Company's titles, retaining Chesler as the packager for both his own previous titles and the two that were continued from the Comics Magazine Co.[3] Financial difficulties forced Ultem to sell some of its properties, including the Clock, to "Busy" Arnold's Quality Comics.

Centaur Comics

Amazing Mystery Funnies No. 1 (1938), art by Bill Everett
By January 1938, Ultem was bought out by Joe Hardie, Fred Gardner, and Raymond Kelly's Centaur Publications, Inc., which had been publishing pulp magazines since at least 1933. Hardie, Gardner, and Kelly used this base to create Centaur Comics, which began publishing in March 1938. They also drew on the back inventory of stories to fill out the early issues of their new titles with reprints.

That two page spread bears no relationship with anything in the book and is very likely a reprint illustration originally intended for another use. Inventory perhaps?
If he was born in 1878 he would have been 59 at this time and retired but still with contacts in the industry. may have done the illo as a favor. 
I have not found any other Rodney Thompson and the fact that the name is highlighted prominently indicates to me that the artist was known and had a reputation.  Yes I may be wrong - happy to be proved so if the evidence is forthcoming.
Cheers!

[crashryan]

Panther, be assured I was not challenging your statements about Rodney Thomson. Saying "you might be right" is about myself, not you. When trying to ID an artist like this I'm always reluctant to come right out and say, "it's A." There's so much backstage history I don't know, and I've followed my share of blind alleys in the past (anyone remember "Kenneth Landau = Martin Landau"?) Plus there are so many odd coincidences to cloud matters. How likely is it that two newspaper strip cartoonists named Richard Fletcher both drew features around the same time and worked at the same newspaper? I find it much easier to say "That's not A." Gerald McCann is not George Evans and never will be, no matter how many times the GCDB says he is.

Anyway, I dug up a few more tidbits about Rodney Thomson's earlier career, all of which support the notion that RT the etcher and RT the centerspread artist are the same person. I've posted this info in a separate topic.

[The Australian Panther]

Hey Crash! No worries at all!

Cheers!