I was sorry to learn tonight of the death of comics artist Dick Ayers at age 90. Ayers drew or inked a lot of notable comics, including Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos and Fantastic Four, and he may have been the last surviving Marvel artist of the early 1960’s*. The comic I most associate him with is the original Ghost Rider, a Western hero who predated the motorcycle-riding Ghost Rider (and who was later renamed Night Rider to eliminate that confusion).

But that’s not the primary way I remember Dick Ayers. Dick Ayers was also the first, or one of the first, pro interviews I got for the comics fanzines I published in my teens in the 1970’s. He lived in upstate New York, where a young artist named Rich Mayone who drew comic strips for my fanzine heard about him and was able to get an interview. Here’s how Rich pitched the interview to me (and I’m paraphrasing): “There’s a guy around here, an inker, who did a lot of Marvel comics. Mostly Westerns, but still, it was Marvel.” As is typical with 14-year-olds, neither of us had any awareness of, and probably not much interest in, what this artist had been doing even five years earlier.

*update, two-and-a-half hours later:  (Other than a guy named Steve Ditko!)

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