Things falls apart. That’s one of the facts of art. Material gets buried under other material. That’s another art fact. They are both about the meeting — sometimes gradual, sometimes sudden — of aesthetics and physics, the moment when it becomes clear to the eye that a thing of beauty, while always a joy, will not last forever, at least in its original form.

View and buy ”Guggenheim Museum Bilbao“ by Frank Gehry on fineartmultiple, the leading online gallery for contemporary art.

At that point, among art experts, the focus of attention will shift from a study of art’s creation to questions of preservation. How do you arrest gravity? How do you freeze time?

It is at this point that art and science converge. You can see that convergence in action in “Imageless: The Scientific Study and Experimental Treatment of an Ad Reinhardt Black Painting,” a small, engrossing, meditative exhibition at the. The show starts with a story. In 2000 the Guggenheim was given a gift, by the AXA Art Insurance Corporation, of a painting by the New York artist Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967).

The picture, done sometime in the 1960s, was from Reinhardt’s late series of “Black Paintings,” which he sometimes referred to as “Ultimate Paintings,” because he felt they took abstraction as far as it could go in terms of color and form. Done in shades of black, with subliminal traces of underlying grids, these were endgame objects, versions of an absolutist art. They embodied no narratives, projected no emotions, broadcast no beliefs; they absorbed light, gave off no heat. The primary reward they offered was the experience of being with them, which, to be an experience (as opposed to a mere walk-by sighting), required patience and concentration. Advertisement Despite their visual and conceptual rigor, though, the black paintings are physically delicate in the extreme. The mere touch of a finger leaves a permanent imprint on their matte, suedelike surfaces. The accidental brush of an elbow could create a trail as conspicuous as a tear.

Reinhardt was well aware of the paintings’ fragility. Surely he knew that their precarious flawlessness was part of their mystique.

It contributed to their being perceived, and valued, as pure things in a corrupted world. To maintain this perfection, Reinhardt made himself readily available to repair paintings, or substitute fresh ones if necessary. When he offered to replace a damaged black painting in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection, curators balked. But we want our painting, they said.

So battles over authenticity — over what constituted an original Reinhardt, or a particular Reinhardt, or an imperfect-but-acceptable Reinhardt — began during his lifetime and have grown knottier since. The Guggenheim’s black painting is painful evidence of these wars: it is not just seriously battle-scarred, it is a ruin, a reject, not-art. Having acquired it in that parlous condition, bruised and overpainted, AXA was initially planning to warehouse it. Instead it gave the picture to the Guggenheim, not as an exhibitable work of art, but as an object for study and experimentation.

The gesture was the equivalent of donating a body to science; dissection, not resurrection, was the goal. The Guggenheim’s conservation department, headed by Carol Stringari, who organized this show, has made excellent and extensive use of the gift. Over the past several years she and the other conservators on her team, among them Julie Barten of the Guggenheim and Chris McGlinchey from the Museum of Modern Art, have applied various kinds of investigative technology to the painting, both to discover its past and shape the future of paintings of its kind. Imageless: The Scientific Study and Experimental Treatment of an Ad Reinhardt Black Painting A 1955 photograph of Reinhardt in his New York studio, from an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. Credit Walter Rosenblum. Thomas Hess papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Some of that history was already available.

Reinhardt documented his technique in notebooks and letters. We know how he siphoned off most of the oil from his oil paint to achieve a powdery, pastel-like, moisture-thirsty surface. We also know that he added small quantities of color to his blacks in order to differentiate them. And we know how he applied his paint in blocks, gradually, with carefully layered strokes to create the illusion of an unstroked surface. To the conservators it was clear at a glance that the visible paint on the Guggenheim painting was not Reinhardt’s. It looked too unstroked and seamless, and had a faint sheen.

Chemical analysis identified the paint as acrylic; Reinhardt used only oil. Drivers Yamaha 01x Manual. A vertical slice of surface pigment placed under a microscope revealed several layers of acrylic paint sitting on top of Reinhardt’s original oil layers, suggesting there had been more than one repainting during the picture’s history. X-rays revealed the probable motivation for these early freshenings-up to be the presence of stains and scratches on the original surface. At some point someone decided that having a clean surface was more important than having a marked-up Reinhardt surface.

Such judgment calls are inherent to art conservation, a field that straddles science, aesthetics and ethics, as the conservators implicitly stand in for an artist who is no longer around to make decisions. The most important and difficult investigative work, though, was on the question of how to reverse or remediate existing damage. Art conservation operates on two very basic procedural principles. The first, also familiar from medicine, is to do no harm. The second is to do nothing that cannot be undone. But with work as vulnerable to harm as Reinhardt’s, even these simple stipulations can leave a conservator’s hands tied. Any intervention is a major one, and experimenting, which by definition entails the possibility of mistakes, is out of the question, particularly as the market value of Reinhardt’s paintings, relatively low in his lifetime, has soared.

Advertisement It is in this area that the AXA donation, which was accompanied by a conservation study grant, has been especially valuable. It meant that advanced but still tentative technologies could be applied to a “real” Reinhardt without the usual inhibiting precautions.

The most dramatic of these new approaches were laser technologies developed in Greece and the Netherlands, specifically for use on “imageless” monochromatic surfaces. In this case they were used to remove layers of unwanted paint without damaging Reinhardt’s original surface and to repair damage on that original surface. The results were hit and miss. The removal of paint was uneven, the damage uncertainly repaired.

And you can see the effects on the Guggenheim’s painting, which is displayed in the gallery, along with science-fair-style photographs and texts and an excellent video that delivers intense amounts of information with the dramatic pacing of an adventure story, and it is an adventure: after all, you are watching an object being taken apart, layer by layer, molecule by molecule, in an exhaustive, elusive and ultimately inconclusive quest for something — a living work of art — that may no longer be there. Yet at the Guggenheim, at least, the story has a sublime ending. Just off the main exhibition Ms. Stringari has installed a group of “Black Paintings” in apparently pristine condition in a plain room with a big bench, and with the low lighting Reinhardt stipulated. They don’t feel either particularly heavy or light, joyous or somber, perfect or imperfect. You let your eyes rest on them, and what you see changes, constantly: blacks change shades; reds and blues appear and fade.

One minute you think you are looking at a grid or a cruciform; the next at a cloudy sky or a Monet landscape, dark like the negative of a photograph. Your vision is changing things; you are changing. The paintings are not. But they are, perhaps, leaving their trace on your psyche and memory.

The mark may be permanent, whatever permanent means.

Chris Achilleos Born in Famagusta, Cyprus, Chris moved to England with his family in 1960. With a prolific career now spanning over 30 years, Chris is famous for his celebrated paintings for book covers, posters, films, album sleeves and video covers. His work includes covers for authors Edgar Rice Burroughs, Michael Moorcock, Robert E Howard and J R R Tolkien, and for Star Trek and Doctor Who. He has worked for film giants George Lucas, Ron Howard and Ray Harryhausen, and produced concept designs for the films Heavy Metal and Willow. His poster work includes SuperGirl, Bladerunner and Jackie Chan's The Protector. Chris is most famous for his hard-hitting fantasy works and his unique representation of Amazonian women, many of whom are depicted in these posters! Source: The Illustration Art Gallery.

Neal Adams (born 15 June 1941; USA) Neal Adams was one of the innovators in comic strip art to hit American comic books in the late 1960s and 1970s, revitalizing and redefining the looks of the X-Men and Batman. Adams was also an outspoken advocate of creators rights and was central to the attempts to help Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster earn pensions from their creation of Superman and in the setting up of the Comics Creators' Guild.

Adams has won the Shazam Award in 1970 and 1971, the Inkpot Award in 1976, Eagle Awards in 1977 and 1978 and has been indicted into the Will Eisner Comic Books Hall of Fame in 1998 and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1999. Neal Edward Adams was born on Governors Island, a 172-acre island a half mile from the southern tip of Manhattan in New York Harbor used by the US Army, on 15 June 1941. His father deserted the family when Adams was only 13 and, with college financially out of reach, he attended the School of Industrial Art, a vocational school in Manhattan.

Graduating in 1959, and turned down by DC Comics, he submitted samples to Archie Comics where Joe Simon was creating a superhero line. A sample of The Fly earned him his first professional appearance when a panel from his sample was used in Adventures of The Fly #4 (Jan 1960). Adams was soon drawing fillers for Archie's Joke Book Magazine and was recommended to Howard Nostrand, who needed an assistant on 'Bat Masterson', a syndicated newspaper strip based on the TV series. Adams gained some much needed experience on the strip and turned to advertising, working for Johnstone & Cushing for a year. The company specialised in comic strip advertising and Adams found himself working on AT&T advertising strip 'Chip Martin, College Reporter' for Boys' Life and similar work for the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. Adams, following a recommendation by Jerry Caplin (brother of Al Capp), was asked to produce samples for a new strip to be based on the popular TV drama Ben Casey.

The strip was successfully pitched and was syndicated from 26 November 1962 with a colour Sunday strip added on 20 September 1964. The TV series came to an end in March 1966 and the strip followed on 31 July 1966. Adams attempted to return to advertising work but needed to fill in, ghosting a few weeks for Lou Fine on the syndicated hardboiled detective serial 'Peter Scratch', Stan Drake's 'The Heart of Juliet Jones' and was hawking around a strip of his own, 'Tangent'.

He was offered work by Peter Scratch-creator Elliot Caplin on a proposed adaptation of Robin Moore's The Green Berets but Adams – opposed to the war – suggested Joe Kubert, who accepted the job. Adams made his first splash in comic books drawing horror stories for Warren Publishing before exploiting the gap left by Kubert at DC Comics. After producing a handful of war and horror stories for anthologies like Our Army at War, Adams found himself working on The Adventures of Jerry Lewis and The Adventures of Bob Hope.

After producing a few covers featuring Superman and Batman for Action Comics, Lois Lane and The Brave and the Bold, Adams produced his first team-up story, 'The Superman-Batman Revenge Squads' for World's Finest Comics in 1968. However, it was with the supernatural hero Deadman that Adams found his first real success. He took over the artwork with Strange Adventures #206 and illustrated the stories and covers for eleven issues, also taking over the scriptwriting with issue 212.

Adams also briefly drew (and even more briefly wrote) The Spectre in 1968. Adams was assigned numerous covers at DC and, in 1969, also began working for Marvel Comics, pencilling several issues of X-Men, then under threat of cancellation. He, along with writer Roy Tomas and inker Tom Palmer, are credited with turning the characters around, all three winning the Alley Awards (Best Pencil Artist, Best Inking Artist, Best Writer). That same year Deadman entered the Hall of Fame and Adams received a Special Award for 'the new perspective and dynamic vibrance he has brought to the field of comic art.' Awards could not save X-Men, which folded with issue 66 (Mar 1970).

Adams continued to draw horror comics for Marvel (Tower of Shadows) and Warren (Vampirella), but it was his debut on Batman which was to cement his place in comics' history. He debuted in Detective Comics (Jan 1970) with a story by writer Dennis O'Neil and, in the next eighteen months, introduced the characters Man-Bat and Ra's al Ghul. Adams' talent to draw realistic figures helped ground the series in the real after years of camp adventure that had overtaken the comic book following the success of the 1966-68 TV series. Adams and O'Neil gave Gotham back its brooding hero and reestablished characters like The Joker as a homicidal maniac rather than the prancing buffoonery of the ABC TV show. Adams and O'Neill also performed a similar revamping of Green Lantern and Green Arrow. Green Lantern was renamed Green Lantern/Green Arrow with issue 76 (Apr 1970) and took the two characters on a journey across America that ran for two years and encompassed one of the pair's most controversial stories in which Green Arrow's ward, the clean-cut Speedy, was revealed as a heroin addict.

The series ended with issue 89 (May 1972). The frustrating truth being that controversy in comics rarely translated into sales to the broader public. Speaking in 1978, Adams told The Comics Journal, 'It takes a good year to get somebody used to a new idea, to get a market used to a new idea. It takes a while for the news to get around. By the time the news got around to Green Lantern / Green Arrow it was cancelled.'

With the exception of his work on Batman, Adams became a more sporadic contributor to DC, although he was involved in a number of 'event' comics, such as the inter-company crossover, Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man (1976) and Superman vs. Muhammad Ali (1978), the latter a 72-page story teaming Superman with boxer Ali to battle aliens. In 1971, Adams and Dick Giordano, an inker with whom he often worked, set up Continuity Graphics Associates Inc. To produce storyboards for movies and produce comic art for advertising. A studio was set up in New York through which dozens of artists passed. Advertising work would often be passed around various artists with Adams and Giordano inking the main figures.

This team effort was often credited to the 'Crusty Bunkers', including numerous inking jobs for DC Comics, in the period 1972-77. Adams was also the art director and costume designer for Warp! (1973) a Broadway play by film director Stuart Gordon and playwright Lenny Kleinfeld.

By the late 1970s, Adams was almost invisible at DC or Marvel due, he said, to the introduction of a Work-For-Hire contract which he considered to be 'against the intent of the new copyright law.' In 1978 he helped set up the Comics Creators' Guild, which attracted 50 members. The Guild, says Adams, achieved many of its aims. Adams also took time out to study a film course at NYU and filmed a full-length horror film, Nannaz, on a $30,000 budget. It starred Adams, his children Jason and Zeea and comic personalities Gray Morrow and Denys Cowan and told the story of two children who protect an invention of their father's from crooks with the aid of a toy monkey. It was reputedly released via Troma Entertainment in Europe in 1986 or 1987 under the title Death to the Pee-Wee Squad.

In the 1980s, Adams was tempted back into comics and produced Ms. Mystic (1982) and Skateman (1983) for Pacific Comics, the latter lasting only a single issue which was cited as the worst single comic of the past 25 years by Kitchen Sink Press's World's Worst Comics Awards (1990). Mystic, a witch in the modern world, appeared only twice from Pacific before transferring to Adams' own company, Continuity Comics in 1987. Formed in 1984, Continuity launched a number of titles, including Zero Patrol, a reworking of a Spanish series by Esteban Maroto (2 issues, 1984-85) and Echo of Futurepast, an anthology which serialised a number of creations that Adams had planned as books to be published in Europe, including a Dracula-Werewolf-Frankenstein team-up by Adams (based on a 1975 comic book and record set, A Story of Dracula, the Wolfman and Frankenstein from Power Records), 'Bucky O'Hare' by Larry Hama & Michael Golden, 'Tippie Toe Jones' by Lindley Farley & Louis Mitchell and 'Mudwogs' by Arthur Suydam.

Continuiuty entered the superhero market with Armor (1985-92), Revengers (1986-89), Toyboy (1986-89), Samuree (1987-91), Zero Patrol (1987-89), Ms. Mystic (1987-93), Urth 4 (1989-90) and Megalith (1989-93). A 1993 relaunch saw a number of series revert to issue one and new titles appear, the Continuity line-up now including Armor, Cyberrad, Earth, Hybrids, Megalith and Ms. Mystic, with Samuree, Shaman and Valerie, She-Bat added soon after. Continuity were caught up in the collapse of the speculative comics' boom in 1994 part-way through a company-wide crossover.

At the time, Adams was also involved in a court case – with Michael Netzer over the rights to Ms. Mystic – which was dismissed in 1997. One Continuity success was Bucky O'Hare, which became an animated TV series in 1991-92 under the title Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars! On which Adams was credited as executive producer. Adams has worked as a concept designer on movies such as From Beyond (1986), Dolls (1987), Circuitry Man (1990), and the Skeleton Warriors TV series (1994-95). Adams continues to work with Continuity Studios to produce material for companies, including motion capture comics (such as Astonishing X-Men: Gifted, scripted by Joss Whedon, in 2009 and the upcoming Neal Adams' Blood, based on his Dark Horse Presents series), animatics and CGI. He has also recently been involved with the Disney Educational productions to produce They Spoke Out: American Voices against the Holocaust, an online educational motion comics series that relates the stories of Americans who protested the Nazis or aided Jews during the Holocaust.

The first episode was screened in April 2010. Neal Adams' Monsters, the long-promised story featuring Frankenstein, the Werewolf and Dracula, appeared as a hardcover book in 2004. Adams has occasionally returned to mainstream comics including stories for Giant Size X-Men #3 (2005) and Young Avengers Special #1 (2006) for Marvel and Batman: Odyssey (2010-12) for DC. It was recently (May 2012) announced that Adams would be co-writing (with Christos Gage) The First X-Men, a 5-issue mini-series which Adams would be drawing.

Adams has also been involved in a 5-part Wolverine project. Adams has been twice married, to Cory Adams and Marilyn Adams. His children include daughters Kristine Stone and Zeea Moss and sons Jason (a sculptor under the name Spyda), Joel and Josh Adams.

Source: Steve Holland. See for a Neal Adams feature article. Charlie Adlard Charlie Adlard has been discovered and rediscovered a number of times in both the UK and US. After producing a string of short-lived strips beginning with Biggles Bear in 1989, Adlard approached Steve MacManus with samples and was offered a Judge Dredd strip. He then drew various strips for the Judge Dredd Megazine, notably Armitage, about a brutal Brit-Cit cop and his partner, Treasure Steel (who subsequently featured in her own series), and for Marvel UK, where his best work was probably Dances With Demons, a 4-issue mini-series penned by Simon Jowett; a second collaboration with Jowett, entitled 'Bloodrush', went unpublished. By this time, Adlard had been discovered by American publishers, drawing stories for Black Orchid Annual, Marvel Comics Presents and Good Guys. After producing a five-issue run of Mars Attacks!

For Topps, Adlard began working on the best-selling X-Files comic strip from the same publisher. The strip was a tremendous success and was still selling an average 130,000 copies per issue when Adlard decided to leave, claiming that the strip was straight-jacketed by the demands of the company and he had little artistic control.

He left to work on Shadowman for Acclaim and, although never short of relatively high-profile work (on, for instance, The Crow, Gen13, Superman and X-Men, it might be said that Adlard was critically discovered only when he began working on Larry Young's Astronauts in Trouble in 1999. In the 2000s, Adlard was, again, kept busy on a range of titles, including Blair Witch: Dark Testaments and Double Image for Image; The Authority and The Establishment for WildStorm, Before the Fantastic Four, X-Men Unlimited, Peter Parker: Spider-Man, ThunderBolts and Warlock for Marvel and Batman/Scarface: A Psychodrama, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Harley Quinn and Batman: Gotham Knights for DC.

However, it was with The Walking Dead for Image that Adlard was yet again rediscovered in 2004. Adlard replaced original artist Tony Moore with issue 7 (April 2004) and has continued the series ever since. The post-zombie apocalypse storyline proved very popular with readers and The Walking Dead won the Eisner Award for Best Continuing Series in 2010. Adlard has retained his connections with the UK, drawing the graphic novel Playing the Game by Doris Lessing in 1995 and episodes of Nikolai Dante for 2000AD in the late 1990s. However, it was the relaunch of Pat Mills' Savage in 2004 that brought Adlard back to the attention of fans of British comics. He went on to draw three series of the character's revival between 2004 and 2007. Source: Steve Holland.

Martin Aitchison (born 1919; UK) Aitchison was born in Birmingham. He was educated at Ellesmere College in Shropshire, leaving aged 15 to attend the Birmingham School of Art and then Slade School of Art. He married fellow art student Dorothy Self. He exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1939. He was deaf, excluding him from active service in the Second World War, but he worked for Vickers Aircraft as a technical illustrator. He produced drawings for the bouncing bomb designed by Barnes Wallis for the Dam Busters air raid.

He became a freelance commercial artist after the war, producing drawings for a range of magazines. His earliest work was for Hulton Press' Lilliput magazine.

He drew for Girl, filling in for Ray Bailey on Kitty Hawke and her All-Girl Air Crew, and illustrating Flick and the Vanishing New Girl in the first Girl annual. He began to work for the Eagle in 1952, drawing the French Foreign Legion strip Luck of the Legion, written by Geoffrey Bond, for nearly ten years, including spin-off strips in ABC Film Review in 1952. He also drew spy series Danger Unlimited and adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and C. Forrester's Horatio Hornblower stories for the Eagle, and Arty and Crafty, written by Geoffrey Bond, for Eagle's junior companion paper Swift.

His work for comics displayed his talents in an exuberant and creative medium, working mainly from imagination. He joined Ladybird Books in 1963, and with Harry Wingfield illustrated many titles in its new Key Words Reading Scheme books, also known as Peter and Jane, which were used to teach so many British children to read.

The consistency, naturalistic style and attention to detail of the artist made him a favourite with the prolific British publisher and over a period of a quarter of a century, he illustrated at least 100 different titles. Martin Aitchison was not the only artist to make the switch from The Eagle to Ladybird; Frank Hampson and Frank Humphris also followed the same path.

He left Ladybird in 1987, and retired - apart from drawing a new comic strip, Justin Tyme - ye Hapless Highwayman, written by Geoffrey Bond, and later his son Jim, for the fanzine Eagle Times from 1998 to 2004. Cecil Aldin (28 April 1870 - 6 January 1935) During his lifetime, Cecil Aldin was described as one of the leading spirits in the renaissance of British sporting art. Following the death of Henry Aiken in 1851, sporting art had been in the doldrums—the comic art of John Leech aside—until the emergence of Aldin and Denholm Armour (1864-1949) towards the end of the 19th century. Between them, they founded a school of realistic portrayal of country pursuits which not only appealed to sportsmen but to the broader public. He was particularly noted for painting of horses, dogs and hunting scenes—a hobby he particularly enjoyed. The anonymous writer of Aldin's obituary in The Times noted, 'But there never yet has been a painter of dogs fit to hold a candle to him. Of all his immensely diverse interests the study of dogs came foremost.

As an artist he had the ability to portray the character of his subject: as a man he understood that subject with the sympathy that enabled him to show us our very friend himself. Somebody once complained that his drawings of dogs were 'too human'; they were not, but often showed character that even their owners had not noticed.' Cecil Charles Windsor Aldin was born in Slough, Buckinghamshire, on 28 April 1870, the son of Charles, a well-to-do builder and contractor, and Sarah Aldin. From an early age he was keen on sketching animals and the countryside and he was encouraged in his artistic aspirations by his father, who readily agreed to his studying art, after which he studied anatomy at South Kensington and animal painting at Midhurst, Sussex, under W. Frank Calderon, who went on to found the School of Animal Painting in 1894. The Aldin family, which also included Cecil's siblings Arthur Reginald (1872-1937), Percy Charles (1874-1956), Mildred Lilian (later Dunn; 1876-1931), had moved to Clapham and lived in a house called Windemere on the south side of Clapham Common. Aldin moved first to Chelsea and then to Bedford Park, Chiswick, where he found himself in a brotherhood of artists which included James Pryde and his brother-in-law William Nicholson—the Beggarstaff Brothers—and John Hassall, Phil May, Dudley Hardy, Lance Thackeray and many others; this wide range of friends and colleagues led to much cross-pollination of ideas and techniques.

One of his earliest commissions came from a Master of Foxhounds who wanted a portrait of a horse, an old polo pony, with the horse itself as payment, which Aldin housed in a bicycle shed. Before long, he could be found hacking on his own mount from Bedford Park to meets at Esher. Over a short period he accumulated a second horse (again in exchange for a portrait of a hunter), a Shetland pony, a donkey, two monkeys and thirteen dogs. His artwork sales paid for his sporting hobbies and there was no shortage of magazines and newspapers who wanted Aldin's work. He found early success when he was asked to illustrated Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Stories in Pall Mall Budget (1894-95). He produced numerous sporting colour prints as well as a series on old inns of England (1919-20), illustrated R. Surtees' famous hunting character Jorrocks (Jorrocks on 'Uniting, 1909; Handley Cross, 1911), Dickens' Pickwick Papers (1910) and many other books, as well as contributing to Ladies Pictorial, Illustrated London News, Sketch, The Gentlewoman, Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, The Queen, Penny Illustrated Paper, The Sphere, Country Gentleman, Printers' Pie, Windsor,Cassell's Family Magazine, Ludgate Monthly, Royal Magazine, Black and White, Good Words, Boy's Own Paper, The Captain, Animal World, Land and Water Illustrated, The Poster, Pearson's Magazine and Punch, amongst others.

In his autobiography, Aldin claimed: 'I may as well state here and have done with it that I have no pretensions to Art. Art for the true artist should have a capital A. For me, I am ashamed to say, it has had a rather small one for my painting has always been founded on substrata of hunting possibilities, that is to say, it has had to provide me with the wherewithal to enable me to hunt, and has been tainted with this aftermath of sporting commercialism.' Aldin's talents did not go unrecognised: he was a member of the Royal Society of British Artists, the London Sketch Club and had many paintings exhibited. He was said to be a man of great charm and organised various shows, including childrens' pony shows at Cloutsham Ball and Dunster, le Touquet, and dog shows which were not always serious (with awards for the ugliest dog, for example). Aldin suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, aggravated by falls in the hunting field, which forced him to give up the sport.

He retired to the Balearic Islands, taking all his dogs with him (horses were left behind with approved new owners) and made his home at Camp de Mar, Andraitz, Mallorca. He died at 20 Devonshire Place, Marylebone, London, on 6 January 1935. He was survived by his wife and daughter, his son having been killed in action whilst serving with the Corps of Royal Engineers in 1916.

Source: Steve Holland. Graham Allen (born 1940; UK) Graham Allen was the son of variety performer Clive Allen.

He joined Fleetway's staff, where he was working as an art bodger on Cowboy Comics Library by 1957. He drew comic strips for IPC titles from the mid 1960s on, including 'Sir Munchkin' (1965) for Lion and 'One Man and his Dog' for Buster. He also drew a weekly strip, 'Lord Elpus' (1965), for the Sunday Extra newspaper. He then moved to Odhams Press, where he drew in a frenetic Leo Baxendale-inspired style for Wham!, Pow!

And Smash!, including 'Tuffy McGrew' and 'The Nervs' for the latter. When Odhams merged into IPC, Allen became a regular artist on their humour comics, drawing “Give a Dog a Bone” (1969) for Whizzer and Chips, 'Mutt 'n' Chops' (1969), 'Fiends and Neighbours' (1973, later in Cor!!), 'Scruffy Dog and Shaggy Dog' and 'Clarence Stringbean' for Buster, and “Eddie” (1970) and 'Spoilsport' (1973) for Cor!! Other IPC titles he worked on include TV21, ('Mickey's Moonbugs'), Look-In ('Please Sir!'

And 'The Fenn Street Gang', 1972), Score 'n' Roar ('Trouble Shooter'), Whoopee! ('Spy School', 1974). He also worked for DC Thomson, drawing 'Copycat' for Magic and 'Digby the Human Mole' for Plug, and Polystyle's TV Comic, drawing 'Nellie and her Tellie' (1974).

From 1981 he drew the daily strip Pub Dog for the Daily Express, and later the Evening News. Other newspaper strips he drew in the 80s and 90s include King Kat for the Daily Star, One Boy and his Dog for the News of the World and Rocky Starr in People Magazine.

He also tried his hand at political cartooning for the London Daily News and Daily Express. He has also drawn for Viz, and is a prolific book illustrator. Source: UK Comics Wiki http://ukcomics.wikia.com/wiki/Graham_Allen.

Alvaro?Mendoza (possibly born 1952; Spain or Mexico) Artist, possibly Spanish, about whom nothing can be traced. A number of other artists share this name – one, Alvaro Mendoza, a Mexican artist who has a similar signature (written in capital letters). Mendoza was born in Izlahuaaca, Mexico, in 1952 and clearly would not have been contributing to Look and Learn in January 1963 (!), when two images of Don Quixote and his squire, Sancho Panza, appeared in the magazine. The signature on the above picture was removed when it was printed in Look and Learn, as was the colour: it appeared only in black & white.

Source: Steve Holland. Colin Andrew Colin Andrew has had a long and varied career in comics and as an illustrator and book cover artist, yet remains one of the lesser-known names in the field despite some high profile work. Born and raised in Dundee, Andrew found work as a junior in Bill McCail's Mallard Features studio in Glasgow. His first published work was a cartoon in Lilliput magazine, and his first strip was for a local paper where he dreamed up the storylines and drew layouts for a story of anthropomorphic trains, in the spirit of Thomas the Tank Engine.

After his national service, he moved to London and joined the King-Ganteaume studio, working mostly Westerns and historical strips for Pancho Villa, Rocky Mountain King, TV Heroes and other Len Miller titles. When the King-Ganteaume partnership split, Andrew continued to work for Kenneth King, contributing to Lone Star and Space Ace.

In the late 1950s, Andrew drew a great deal for Zip and Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse, notably the Captain Morgan strip in Zip. In 1960 he assisted Syd Jordan, another McCail studio alumni, on Jordan's Daily Express strip Jeff Hawke. The strips were written by Willie Patterson, with whom Andrew collaborated on two newspaper strips in Lord Beaverbrook's Glasgow Daily Herald, both factual strips, one a history of the world cup, the other on famous football players. His favourite strip was also penned by Patterson, What Is Exhibit X in Boys' World, starring John Brody, a scientific investigator for the Daily Newsflash. The strip was subsequently taken over and Andrew found himself drawing The Boy Who Knew Too Much in Buster as well as features for Boys' World, Eagle, Lion and Tiger over the next few years. He returned to strip work drawing Tomorrow West in Solo, followed by stints in Fireball XL5 and Stingray in TV Century 21 and Alias Smith and Jones for TV Action.

Since the 1970s he has concentrated on illustration (including work for World of Wonder and Look and Learn) and book covers; in particular he supplied New English Library with many quickly executed covers in the 1970s. He has also storyboarded television commercials, including the UK Government's PowerGen sell-off. In the 1980s he also drew editorial cartoons for a local newspaper for three years. Andrew returned to comics in the 1990s via his friend Syd Jordan, who suggested he submit samples to Fleetway and Marvel UK. He was contacted by the latter and worked irregularly on episodes of Dr. Who strips in Doctor Who Magazine. Source: Steve Holland.

Barrie Appleby; UK Barrie Appleby is a British comics artist and illustrator who works mainly for Scottish publisher D. Thomson & Co., drawing strips such as Dennis the Menace and Roger the Dodger for The Beano since the 1970s. He has also drawn Cuddles and Dimples for The Dandy, as well as strips for Nutty, Hoot, Monster Fun and Buster. He also drew Bananaman in the BEEB comic. In 1999, he took over Bananaman in the Dandy from John Geering. He returned for a short time to do Bananaman in 2008.

In 2003, he took over Roger the Dodger after the death of Robert Nixon. Appleby's Roger strips were similar in style to Nixon's, although his own style was always evident. However, following the Dandy's revamp in October 2004, he relinquished Cuddle Dimples to Nigel Parkinson. A couple of years later, he drew two new strips for the Beano, with Pirates of the Caribeano beginning in September 2006 and London B412 following in October 2007, both were short-lived. He also provided the cover illustrations for the 2008 and 2009 editions of the Beano Annual.

In February 2011, Appleby became the full-time Dennis the Menace artist, and he stopped drawing Roger shortly afterwards. Barrie Appleby returned to draw new Roger the Dodger episodes in August 2012 after Nigel Parkinson took over as Dennis artist.

He supposedly left in The Beano in July 2013 along with Barry Glennard and Dave Eastbury when Roger was taken over by Jamie Smart. In early 2014, Barrie returned to The Beano to draw Gnasher and Gnipper and returned to Roger the Dodger in July. ' I think the Beano still sells after all these years because it epitomises British humour - it's very surreal with a lot of slapstick, which goes right back to Charlie Chaplin. It appeals to that anarchic side of kids, the side that enjoys seeing someone get one over on adults. If somebody's trousers fall down or they get kicked up the bum, kids love it. I loved it at that age; it was the same with my kids and now with my grandchildren. At the age of seventeen I was lucky enough to get a position as an art assistant, working for the Walt Disney orgnisation.

This meant leaving my home near Barnsley, South Yorkshire and moving to London. After a few years I married and moved to Canada where both my children were born.

Again I was extrememly lucky to find a posistion with a book publisher in Toronto where I was soon made art director. However cartoons were still in my blood and I returned to the U.K.

It wasnt long before I built up a client base which included IPC Magazines, Marvel Comics and of course D.C Thomson, for whom I have drawn many of their famous characters. Many of which can be seen on this site. I have lived for many years with my wife Eileen in a small village near Sudbury, Suffolk. Both my children Carrie and Jason and my six grandchildren live near. After many years of hiding my head in the sand in the face of modern technology my son and grandson, Ben have dragged me kicking and screaming into the 21st Century, by setting up this website for me.

' -- Barrie Appleby Source: Illustration Art Gallery, Barrie Appleby. Arens (2 December 1915 - 19 June, 1976, USA) Mike Arens was born in California and began his career as an animator, joining Walt Disney Studios as a production artist in 1937. He worked on the Dance of the Hours segment of Fantasia, and on Pinocchio. After performing his military service in 1942-47, Arens became a regular newspaper strip artist with Hey, Mac! He turned to comic books in the late 1940s, drawing artwork for Street & Smith's Top Secrets in 1949. From 1952, he drew dozens of strips for Dell Publishing, his first work mostly western strips such as Gene Autry (1951-52, 1954-55, 1957), The Frontiersman (1952-58), Buck Jones (1953-54), Rex Allen (1953, 1956-57), Flying-A's Range Rider (1954-55), Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier (1955), Dale Evans (1956), Chuckwagon Charley (c.1958), and various for Western Roundup (1952-58).

Arens began producing Disney characters for overseas comics such as the British Huckleberry Hound comic in 1961-62. For Western Publishing he drew a variety of Disney and adventure strips, including Chip 'n' Dale (Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, 1962), Goofy (1963), Donald Duck (1963), Mary Poppins (Gold Key one-shot, 1964), My Favourite Martian (1964-66), Tarzan (1965-66) and Korak (1966). For King Features he drew the Roy Rogers Sunday strip (1959-62), Uncle Remus and his Tales of Br'er Rabbit (1968), Mickey Mouse (1968) and both daily and Sunday episodes of Scamp (with inker Manuel Gonzales, 1969-76). Arens was also responsible for a number of Disney Christmas Stories--including Snow White's Christmas Surprise (1966) and Dumbo and the Christmas Mystery (1967)--and many newspaper adaptations for King Features/Walt Disney Productions, including Robin Hood (1973-74), Alice in Wonderland (1974), Herbie Rides Again (1974), (1976), Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too (1975), and many others. Arens had a parallel career in animation from 1965, working as a story director for Grantray-Lawrence on their Spider-Man and Marvel Superheroes animated shows. In 1967 he became a layout artist for Hanna-Barbera, working on dozens of animated TV shows, including Fantastic 4 (1967), The Banana Splits Adventure Hour (1968-70), Scooby Doo, Where Are You!

(1969-70), amongst many. He was also layout artist on Charlotte's Web, the 1973 Hanna-Barbera movie adaptation of E.

White's classic novel about a pig trying to avoid being killed for Christmas. Abridged from biographical notes by Steve Holland.

John J Arnold John J. Arnold was a commercial artist specialising in transport. He is known to have contributed illustrations to Look and Learn and Speed & Power magazines, and almost certainly contributed to other IPC Transport titles.

His work for Look and Learn often involved beautifully rendered line & wash diagrams of cars, such as in his 'Classic Cars' series (1974) and 'Novelties of Mobility' (1974-75). He also illustrated other forms of transport, including sailing ships and paddle steamers. From biographical notes by Steve Holland. Martin Asbury Martin Asbury grew up addicted to comics, trawling through newsagents and book shops looking for American comics. Influenced by Burne Hogarth's 'Tarzan', Classics Illustrated and Frank Hampson's 'Dan Dare', he was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and studied painting at St. Martin's College of Art.

Apart from illustrating a story for a comic book giveaway, his first illustrative work included the sheet music for Ron Grainer's The Maigret Theme and painting cardboard cut-outs for use on TV. An advert in an magazine led him to apply for a job as an assistant for 'an international cartoonist'; this was on Flash Gordon and Asbury moved to Austria for six months before clashes with Dan Barry led to his departure. Back in England he designed cards for Hallmark, rising to become their chief designer. Married in 1969, he decided to go freelance and found work drawing for D. Thomson's Bunty. With the launch of Wizard in 1970 he graduated onto boys' adventure strips, drawing Soldiers of the Jet Age, The Crimson Claw, The Secret of Deep 16 and others for the paper. At the same time, he also found work on Joe 90: Top Secret, soon to merged with TV21, where he drew Forward from the Back Streets and Tarzan.

Some short-run strips in Countdown led to him drawing Cannon for TV Action and TV Comic before he was hired by Look-In, where, after briefly drawing Follyfoot, he had his first big hit with Kung Fu. Asbury took over the Dr Who strip in TV Comic before returning to Look-In to draw more 'Kung Fu', and his biggest hit, The Six Million Dollar Man, which ran for four years (1975-79). At the same time, Asbury took over the artwork for Garth in the Daily Mirror following the death of Frank Bellamy. He was to draw the strip for 21 years, working initially with Jim Edgar.

From 1995, Asbury also scriptwrited the strip. In the early days of the strip, Asbury was also able to continue working for Look-In, his strips for that paper including 'Dick Turpin', 'Battlestar Galactica' and 'Buck Rogers in the 25th Century'. However, an opportunity arose in the early 1980s for a change in artistic direction. Asbury explained how he became a storyboard artist in an interview in Starlog: 'When I was a strip cartoonist, I occasionally did TV commercial storyboards. A friend of mine (Dez Skinn) had an agency dealing with design and graphics and one day a man literally walked in off the street looking for a storyboard artist. I met this guy, production designer Stuart Craig, and he was about to start work on the film Greystoke with director Hugh Hudson. It was that simple.

'For Greystoke I did nearly 3,500 huge drawings, many of them in full colour. I didn't know they were going to be fed through a copying machine and come out as grey blotches. I learned my lesson on that.

Since the release of Greystoke in 1984, Asbury has storyboarded dozens of movies, a few sample credits would include Labyrinth, Willow, Alien 3, Chaplin, Interview with the Vampire, Fierce Creatures, Quills, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Thunderpants, The Hours, Troy, Alexander, Batman Begins, The Da Vinci Code, The Boat That Rocked, the last six James Bond movies (Brosnan/Craig) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. He continues to work as a storyboard artist, his most recent work being for the upcoming Between Two Worlds. Taken from biographical notes by Steve Holland. Ray Aspden Ray Aspden has been an irregular comic strip writer and illustrator for 35 years, contributing Philpot Bottles' Orfice Boys Own to Denis Gifford's Ally Sloper in 1976-77, a cartoon strip that harked back to the 1930s penny comics, which would often feature a column from the paper's office boy recounting (in badly spelled text) what had been happening that week. Ray, also a playwright, started writing for D. Thomson in the late 1970s, selling two strories to Victor, of which only one appeared ( Stokehold Joe in 1980).

In 1978, having spotted an advert in The Guardian, he contacted the editors of the upcoming science fiction pocket library, Starblazer, and began contributing scripts. His first submission, The Basilisk Face of Fear'- based loosely on the story of Perseus and the Gorgon's head, was accepted and published as Starblazer #2, 'The Domes of Death'.

A second story, a reworking of the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur, followed, published as 'Sinister City' (Starblazer #19). Ray eventually became one of Starblazer's most regular writers, penning 28 issues published between 1979 and 1986. Discussing his work for the series recently, he admitted that the pattern set for those years was to have one in three of his outlines accepted, either immediately or after some amendment. One ploy used by the editors was to send a cover, bought through an agency, and have Ray write a story around it - 'Terror Tomb' (Starblazer #62) being one example.

His best-known work for the series featured Hadron Halley, the idea springing from a reversal of 'sci-fi' (science fiction) - that fi-sci could stand for Fighting Scientist. The concept of 'Moonsplitter' (Starblazer #50) was to contrast the rational scientific approach of Halley to the gung-ho militarism of General Larz Pluto, although in writing the latter as a buffoon he 'transgressed Thomsons moral code of wanting figures of authority to be seen as worthy of respect.' He considers the final book 'a mess'. As well as his Starblazer writing, Aspden also began contributing strips to two Welsh language publications Sboncyn and Deryn in the early 1980s, writing and drawing two humour strips, Jac-Do and Alys Ofalus. Sboncyn was relaunched as Penbwl in 1989, for which Aspden wrote and drew Huwi Hurt, a Dennis the Menace-type character which Aspden turned into a Hungry Horace clone. The monthly comic folded in 1995. Since 2004, Aspden has written and drawn two regular strips for Spaceship Away!

Both Mekki and Our Bertie owe a stylistic debt to the Knockout in the 1950s, rather than Eagle. Ray's interest in history led him to produce illustrations for the series Cutha's Chronicles for the quarterly magazine Wiðowinde (Bindweed), for members of The English Companions (a study group for people interested in the Anglo-Saxon period of British history), since 2005; he has also drawn strips for the historical magazine Facts & Fiction and recently supplied illustrations for the book Derbyshire FolkTales (2010). Abridged from biographical notes by Steve Holland. Sergio Asteriti (born 13 February 1930, Venice, Italy) Sergio Asteriti attended the Venice's Scuola di Magisterto d’Arte, intent on a career in advertising. His first comics work appeared in 1949 when he drew the series I bucanieri for Risveglio, which was distributed around schools in Venice. After taking only one examination, he left school and moved to Milan, finding work with the publicity agency SPINTA where his workload included drawing movie posters featuring many of the actors in vogue at the time.

Two years later, the company went bankrupt and Asteriti found himself in Milan without any work. Not wishing to return to Venice in defeat, Asteriti hawked his portfolio around various publishers.

His interest in comics had developed as a child and, whilst still in Venice, he had known Giorgio Trevisan and Leone Frollo, the latter a Venetian contemporary who introduced him to Giorgio Bellavitis, and other members of the Asso di Picche group, Faustinelli, Ongaro and Pratt. In 1955 he joined the group of talented newcomers who began working for Caregaro's Edizioni Alpe around that era. Asteriti created the character Bingo Bongo, the comic adventures of a young black boy, for the weekly Cucciolo. Other strips from this period included Congolino and Capitan Jolando, as well as covers for Voici d'Oltremare di Bianconi/Missionari Combboniani and contributions to La Vispa Teresa. In 1958, Asteriti began working for the English market via Creazioni D'Ami, Asteriti assisted on Fun in Toyland and The Funny Tales of Freddie Frog for the nursery weekly Jack and Jill and eventually took them over.

'Freddie Frog' was passed on to other artists in 1960, but Asteriti continued to work on 'Fun in Toyland' for many years. He continued to draw for the British market until the mid-1970s, also contributing to Bobo Bunny, and illustrations to Disneyland and Walt Disney's Now I Know. His work also continued to appear in Italy. In the early 1960s he also drew Hayawatha for Corriere dei Piccoli in collaboration with Antonio Lupatelli.

Asteriti has alos illustrated fairy stories for AMZ, Boschi and Carroccio. In 1963, Asteriti produced Pippo e la vacanza culturale, his first strip for the Italian Disney magazine Topolino. Over the next decade he contributed to Disney Italia with increasing regularity and quickly became recognised as one of the leading contributors, both as an artist and, since 1974, a scriptwriter (a task he occasionally shared with his older brother, Franco), and eventually dropped his other work in order to concentrate on Disney characters full time, especially Mickey Mouse. Asteriti has described Mickey as 'the best friend of my childhood', a character with whom he grew up.

'The only drawback is that I have grown older while he has remained the same, young and healthy, without ever catching a cold!' Having written and drawn hundreds of stories, Asteriti continues to be one of the major contributors to Italian Disney comics, his illustrative, decorative style perfectly suited for adventures set in medieval and fairy-tale locations.

He was awarded Il Premio Papersera in 2008. Abridged from biographical notes by Steve Holland. Michel Atkinson Something of a mystery man with regards to cover artwork. Michel Atkinson was an irregular contributor to various romance and schoolgirl pocket libraries from 1961 until the 1970s, producing covers for Romantic Confessions Picture Library (1961), Love Story PL (1961-62, 1965, 1969-70, 1973-74), True Life Library (1961-62, 1965-66, 1968-69), Princess PL (1961-63), Schoolgirls PL (1961-62), School Friend PL (1962-63), June and Schoolfriend and Princess PL (1968). There were some fairly substantial gaps during which time he was probably doing book covers. He is known to have been a regular cover artist for the Hank Janson novels published by Roberts & Vinter in 1961-65 and a wide variety of genres for Digit Books in 1963-65.

Although fairly prolific, it is likely that 'Michel' (as he signed most of his book covers) found more regular work outside of producing book covers for paperbacks and for Fleetway Publications from the mid-1960s onwards. Abridged from biographical notes by Steve Holland.

Richard Bache Ayers (born 28 April 1924; USA) When Dick Ayers was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2007, it was in recognition of his talents as both an inker and penciller. In the former category, he famously inked the work of Jack Kirby when Kirby was at his peak in the 1950s and 1960s, including early episodes of The Fantastic Four; as a penciller he is best known for his work on Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, his work winning the Alley Award for Best War Title in 1967 and 1968.

Richard Bache Ayers was born on 28 April 1924 in Ossining, New York, the son of John Bache Ayers, an insurance agent, and his wife Gladys Adelia (nee Minnerly), and could trace his ancestors back to pioneers who settled at Newbury Plantation, Massachusetts, in 1635. He was raised in Poultney, near Lake Cayuga, and later said that growing up on his uncle's farm contributed to his ability to draw horses. Ayers served with the Army Air Corps during the Second World War. Ayers published his first comic strip in the military newspaper Radio Post in 1942. After leaving the army, he took an adventure story he had written and drawn to Dell Comics; they planned to publish it but the project was scrapped before publication. In 1947, he was taking evening classes at Burne Hogarth's Cartoonists and Illustrators School in New York City where he met Superman co-creator Joe Shuster, who would drop in to visit classes, and Marvin Stein, who was teaching classes as well as being Shuster's chief assistant.

Visiting Shuster's nearby studio, Ayers began producing occasional pencils for Funnyman. Shuster also introduced Ayers to Vin Sullivan of Magazine Enterprises where he began drawing Jimmy Durante and Western strips for A-1 Comics and Trail Colt. Ayers co-created The Calico Kid as a back-up for Tim Holt comic. Whenever trouble loomed, the spineless Calico proved to be a master gunfighter. After five episodes, he revealed an even deeper secret: he was in truth Federal Marshal Rex Fury.

Attacked and left for dead, Fury is visited by the ghosts of those who tried to tame the wild west – Wild Bill Hickok, Kit Carson, Calamity Jane and others – and Fury survives with their skills somehow imprinted on him. Dressed in a phosphorescent costume and riding a white stallion named Spectre, he becomes The Ghost Rider. After his debut in Tim Holt #11, The Ghost Rider soon earned his own title in 1950, which Ayers continued until 1954. He also added stories featuring Bobby Benson's B-Bar-B Riders, based on the boy cowboy of the popular radio series, to his schedule in 1952. At the same time, he began working for Atlas Comics (the forerunner to today's Marvel Comics), drawing horror stories and a revival of The Human Torch.

Ayers was so busy, he employed Ernie Bache as an assistant and set up a small studio in the kitchen of an apartment owned by his wife's employer. In a 2001 interview, Ayers recalled: 'Side-by-side we worked for—oh, that was '52. It wasn't until '55 when that damn Wertham thing came and killed all our books, The Ghost Rider and Human Torch. So we were down and we had, mostly, just Charlton. We didn't quite make it. I lettered first and then I would pencil, and then I'd ink the outlines and then I'd give it to Ernie.

Ernie would erase the page (laughs) and then he would finish it. He would put on all the blacks and the Kraft-Tone and bring in all that stuff. So we made a good team. I didn't bother throwing in heavy blacks. I would start them, maybe, but then he would accentuate the lines I'd put in, make them a little stronger. And he was very meticulous in his approach. I mean, everything had to be a certain formula so that we could knock out four pages a day, so he was a good asset for me.'

The comic book industry was devastated by the introduction of the Comic Code Authority, who banned anything considered dangerous to juvenile morals. Horror and crime stories disappeared almost overnight and, after 167 stories, The Ghost Rider also fell victim to the sweeping industry changes.

Work for Charlton Comics' Crime and Justice and Racket Squad in Action also disappeared. Ayers' attempt at a superhero, The Avenger, lasted only one issue (it was continued by Bob Powell) and a Ghost Rider replacement, The Presto Kid (a cowboy magician who debuted in Red Mask #51), lasted only a few episodes. Ayers subsequently concentrated on his work for Atlas, drawing back-up features with Kid Colt Outlaw, Outlaw Kid, Wyatt Earp and Rawhide Kid and, from 1959, inking Jack Kirby's monster stories in Strange Tales, Journey Into Mystery, Amazing Adventures, Tales to Astonish and Tales of Suspense and over two years of the syndicated newspaper strip 'Sky Masters of the Space Force' (1959-61). As Atlas introduced new characters, and because Kirby was their go-to artist for new strips, Ayers found himself inking the first appearance of The Rawhide Kid (revamped in 1960), Ant-Man (Tales to Astonish #27, 1962), The Human Torch (first solo story, Strange Tales #101, 1962), Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos (1963), and early issues of The Fantastic Four, Thor and The Incredible Hulk (all in 1962).

Inking was a means to an end. Ayers 'only inked to survive in comic books and support my family, which included my wife, 4 children and mother-in-law.' When asked in 2003 who he enjoyed inking for, Ayers replied, 'No one.' In 1964, Ayers took over completely from Kirby as penciller of Sgt.

Fury with issue 8, beginning an almost unbroken decade-long run on the comic that was to last until issue 120. The series was penned by Stan Lee, Roy Thomas and, from 1967, by Gary Friedrich. The team of Friedrich, Ayers and inker John Severin turned the book into a recognisable classic; the Howling Commandos and their cigar-chomping leader, Nick Fury, battled around the world in a series of gritty, strongly moralistic stories which were often as negative about war as they were celebrations. Initially, Ayers had wanted to come off the title: 'I didn't like Kirby's pencilling of Sgt Fury and asked off after the 3rd issue. I was in the Army 1942 – 1945 and it didn't connect with how I pictured 'army.' When Stan put me on to pencilling it, it wasn't until I recalled how it was when, getting into the combat zone, we would exaggerate out combat stories to each other and do anything we could to look different from the others around us. I got a shoulder holster and.45 and wore ski sox and a silk scarf.

Then Sgt Fury and His Howling Commandos became real to me. Tamil Movie Mp3 Songs Free Download on this page. ' In the 1970s, Ayers switched from Marvel to DC Comics, where he pencilled war stories for Star Spangled War Stories, Army at War, All-Out War and other titles. At the same time he pencilled various other series, including Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth (1976-78), Unknown Soldier (1977-82), Scalphunter (1977-81), Sergeant Rock (1978-81) and Jonah Hex (1979-84). 'I was able to accomplish 4 books a month. There'd always be a script for me every time I delivered my pencils,' Ayers recalled. 'As a result I think I did some of my best storytelling at DC. I was asked to pencil tight leaving the blacks and tones for the inker.

It enabled me to do some of my best story telling in Kamandi, Jonah Hex and Unknown Soldier and all the other DC books they had me do.' In the 1980s, Ayers worked for a number of different companies, including Archie, Modern Publishing and Comico, and in the 1990s for Revolutionary and Topps. In 1984-85 he also drew promotional comics for Comic Shack featuring the Tandy Computer Whiz Kids. In 1985 he also accepted the National Cartoonists Society Award for Best Comic Book. Ayers taught at the Joe Kubert School, his students including Tom Mandrake, Jan Dursemma and Karl Kessel. Ayers' early work was rediscovered in 1990 and reprinted by AC Comics, although due to Marvel's copyright on a different character named Ghost Rider, the original had to became Haunted Horseman.

Discovering the reprints, Ayers agreed to draw some new episodes. In the new millennium, Ayers has continued to draw occasionally, contributing pin-ups and a number of short stories to benefit and tribute comics (Actor Comics Presents, 2006, The 3-Minute Sketchbook, 2007; The Uncanny Dave Cockrum, 2007). His latest work was an illustration of NY Police Detective John Wilson for the Marvel Mystery Handbook: 70th Anniversary Special (2009). Ayers' son, Rich, has also drawn comics. Source: Steve Holland. Chris Bachalo (born August 23, 1965) Chris Bachalo is an American comic book illustrator known for his quirky, cartoon-like style.

He became well known for stints on DC Comics’ Shade, the Changing Man and Neil Gaiman's two Death series. Chris has also illustrated several of Marvel Comics’ X-Men-related series, including Generation X (which he co-created), X-Men vol 2, Uncanny X-Men, and Ultimate X-Men.

Beginning in April, 2000 Chris illustrated his creator-owned series Steampunk. Bachalo was born in Canada but was raised in Southern California. He has told interviewers that, as a child, he wanted to be a carpenter until he discovered he was allergic to dust. He attended the California State University at Long Beach, where he majored in graphic art and illustrated a few underground comics. After graduation, Bachalo sought work in the mainstream comic book industry.

His first published assignment was The Sandman #12 (Jan. 1990), part of the 'The Doll's House' story arc, for DC Comics. Although before working on that issue, DC had already hired him as the regular artist for Shade, the Changing Man, an older property revived as an adult-oriented series by writer Peter Milligan.

Bachalo’s early work shows strong influence from Sam Kieth, Bill Sienkiewicz and Michael Golden. As his style developed, however, Bachalo’s work became more idiosyncratic. His early 1990s style is minimalist with strong, thick lines, quirky characters and little concern for realism. Bachalo did not shy away from detailed landscapes but showed a rare penchant for pages with many small panels.

In 1993, writer Neil Gaiman selected Bachalo for the Sandman miniseries Death: The High Cost of Living, starring the Sandman’s older sister. At the time, Sandman was one of the most popular and acclaimed series in the industry and the miniseries helped boost Bachalo’s visibility. The creative pair also reunited for Death: The Time of Your Life in 1996.

After working at Marvel (below), Bachalo briefly returned to DC in 1999 for The Witching Hour mini-series with writer Jeph Loeb for Vertigo. While at DC Comics, Bachalo illustrated the first issue of X-Men Unlimited, which Marvel published as an anthology X-Men comic book.

Based on the success and fanfare from X-Men Unlimited #1, in 1994, Bachalo ended his stint on Shade and began working for Marvel Comics. He then illustrated the first three issues of Ghost Rider 2099, one of in a line of series reinventing popular Marvel characters in the year 2099. He also drew a cover for Runaways.

However, he was soon assigned to create a new junior team of X-Men with Uncanny X-Men writer Scott Lobdell. The group Lobdell and Bachalo created, Generation X, was purposely bizarre and idiosyncratic because the two wanted to avoid the recent trend in superhero teams, where each team member represented a recognizable stock character. Generation X became a hit with the series’ namesake due to Lobdell’s realistically cynical and emotionally immature teen characters and Bachalo’s atypical artwork. Bachalo illustrated the series through much of its first three years, taking a break in late 1995 and early 1996 to illustrate the second Death miniseries, Death: The Time of Your Life.

During his time on Generation X, Bachalo’s artwork underwent a change. Heavily influenced by Joe Madureira, Bachalo's characters became more cartoony and manga-like, with large eyes, heads and hands.

He gravitated towards extremes in anatomy, drawing characters that were previously portrayed as bulky, short, or thin as even more so. In 1997, Bachalo left Generation X for Uncanny X-Men, arguably the comic book industry’s most popular title, remaining until the end of 1998. In 2000, Bachalo launched Steampunk, a comic book series inspired by the genre of fiction of the same name, which emulates early science fiction and in an alternate version of the early 1900s. The series is written by Joe Kelly and is part of Image Comics’ imprint for creator-owned series, Cliffhanger. The series was criticized for Bachalo's overly detailed pencils, small panels and muddy dark coloring, which sometimes made it difficult to discern what was happening.

Similarly, Joe Kelly's writing was not as straightforward as a mass audience typically preferred. Contrarily, the book's supporters praised it for those same reasons, as well as for the sheer imagination of the characters and story. The series, intended to be 25 issues, ended prematurely after the second story arc in issue #12. It is currently available in two reprinted trade paperbacks, Steampunk: Manimatron (ISBN 1-56389-762-8) and Steampunk: Drama Obscura (ISBN 1-4012-0047-8). When Richard Friend inks Chris Bachalo's pencils, the piece is signed “Chrisendo”, a portmanteau of the names “Chris”, “Friend”, and “Bachalo”. In the early 2000s, Bachalo completed occasional work on various X-Men series, including Ultimate X-Men, Ultimate War, Grant Morrison's New X-Men (collected in New X-Men vol. 5: Assault on Weapon Plus) and the sequel to the Age of Apocalypse crossover.

Bachalo was also the artist on Captain America for 6 issues (21–26, running December 2003–May 2004 cover dates) pencilling a divisive run written by Robert Morales. In an attempt to humanize Steve Rogers, the pair managed to split fans opinions fairly resoundingly with both leaving the title - Morales 10 issues short of his intended contract for the series. From 2006 to 2008, Bachalo was the artist for the X-Men title along with new writer Mike Carey after completing his final story arc for Uncanny X-Men (#472–474). He was often filled-in for by artist Humberto Ramos, however. Bachalo has also pencilled (and coloured) a number of cards for the Vs. Collectible card game. These have been renditions of both Marvel and DC characters.

On top of his continuing work for Marvel, Bachalo finished issue #7 of Comicraft's Elephantmen, an issue 4 years in the making. The issue was done entirely in double-page spreads and marks his reunion with Steampunk writer Joe Kelly. The issue's story, “Captain Stoneheart and the Truth Fairy” also represents Bachalo's first work outside Marvel and DC since his fill-in issue of Witchblade. Bachalo has also been one of the four artists who was originally part of the Spider-Man Relaunch. Brand New Day, along with Phil Jimenez, Steve McNiven and Salvador Larroca. Starting with New Avengers #51, Bachalo will provide variant covers for the creative team of Brian Michael Bendis and Billy Tan to bring use the 'Who will be the next Sorceror Supreme?' Antonio Fabela is a regular colorist of Bachalo's work.

Source: Wikipedia. Geoffrey William Backhouse (16 November 1903 - 1 August 1978; b. Holywell, Flintshire, Wales) In 1927, Backhouse began drawing Strongheart the Magnificent for Comic Life, the comic strip adventures of a magnificent German Shepherd modelled on a canine Hollywood film star.

Strongheart, one of the earliest adventure strips to regularly appear in British comics, continued his adventures when Comic Life was relaunched as My Favourite and would continue to appear, drawn by a number of different artists, until 1949. Shortly before the war, Backhouse drew The Stolen King for Comic Cuts and Buffalo Bill for Butterfly. After the war, Backhouse illustrated a number of books for Collins, including Mr. Mole's Circus by Douglas Collins and a number of books by Denis Cleaver, including Pongo the Terrible, On the Air, On the Films and A Dog's Life, which featured the adventures of two dogs named Pongo and Peter. Backhouse's association with Collins also included illustrations for The Children’s Picture Dictionary (1951) and modern editions of Alice In Wonderland and Enid Blyton’s Shadow the Sheepdog. Backhouse’s expertise at drawing animals and nature made him the perfect choice to draw a colourful feature strip starring George Cansdale for Eagle in 1954, following Cansdale's trips around the countryside, and the adventures of Tammy the Sheepdog for Swift (1955-58).

Backhouse subsequently contributed many wildlife illustrations to Look and Learn and Treasure, appearing in the former from 1962 onwards. Some of his most notable contributions were for a series of short animal stories written by F. Mars, Alan C. Jenkins and F.

Turnbull that appeared in 1967-68. He died in Tollington Park, London N4, in 1978. Source: Steve Holland.