Dick Ayers

One of the most celebrated of Marvel's creators, Ayers broke in at Magazine Enterprises in 1948 on Funnyman, Ghost Rider, and other features. As a freelancer in 1949, he penciled a single seven-page crime story for Timely, but no one has been able to identify which story it was. As Timely became Atlas, his first work there was the pre-Code horror story "Ghouls Rush In" in Adventures Into Terror #9 (Apr 1952). Ayers became one of the most prolific of the Atlas artists, drawing nearly 600 stories in all genres, featuring characters such as The Human Torch, Buzz Band, Wyatt Earp, and Rawhide Kid. He replaced Christopher Rule as Jack Kirby's primary inker on innumerable monster stories, Westerns, and finally the early Marvel super-hero launch, where his weighty inks gave Fantastic Four its definitive look. Ayers also drew Giant-Man and the Wasp in Tales to Astonish, replaced Kirby on Two-Gun Kid, and took command of the art on a long run of Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos. Working for nearly every publisher throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Ayers spent the 1970s and 1980s primarily at DC and Archie, contributed to Bill Black's AC Comics in the 1990s, and published a three-volume graphic novel autobiography in the early new millennium.