Dick Ayers
Richard Bache Ayers[2] (/ɛərz/; April 28, 1924 – May 4, 2014) was an American comic book artist and cartoonist best known for his work as one of Jack Kirby's inkers during the late-1950s and 1960s period known as the Silver Age of Comics, including on some of the earliest issues of Marvel Comics' The Fantastic Four. He is the signature penciler of Marvel's World War II comic Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, drawing it for a 10-year run, and he co-created Magazine Enterprises' 1950s Western-horror character the Ghost Rider, a version of which he would draw for Marvel in the 1960s.
Dick Ayers
Richard Bache Ayers
April 28, 1924
Ossining, New York, U.S.
May 4, 2014 (aged 90)
White Plains, New York, U.S.
National Cartoonists Society Award, 1985
Inkpot Awards (2007)[1]
Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame, 2007
Inkwell Awards Joe Sinnott Hall of Fame (2013)
Ayers was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2007.
Early life[edit]
Richard Bache Ayers[3] was born April 28, 1924, in Ossining, New York,[4][5] the son of John Bache Ayers and Gladys Minnerly Ayers.[6] He had a sister who was 10 years older.[7] The siblings were in the 13th generation, he said, of the Ayers family that had settled in Newbury, Massachusetts in 1635.[8] At 18, during World War II, he enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps, and was stationed in Florida, where after failing radar training he was sent for a month's art training at McTomb University and began working as an artist in the Air Corps' Operations division.[7] He published his first comic strip, Radio Ray, in the military newspaper Radio Post in 1942.[5]