After about a year, during a downturn in the comics industry, Kweskin returned to commercial illustration, saying in letters to two comics historians that he "went to work as a studio artist for a while" and then became an art director for an industrial film production company and later at "an agency doing mostly Latin American advertising," followed by a similar position at a different agency working on television commercials. He said he continued to do freelance work including medical illustrations for "Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy", "and, in a couple of years, maintained a small agency of my own."