Dick Ayers, one of the “giants of the Marvel Age of Comics”, has passed at the age of 90.
Michael Cavna has a great report on his life:
DICK AYERS liked to laugh at the idea of a Marvel ?Bullpen? ? that would-be physical collective of cartoonists that, readers were led to imagine, happily churned out all those inspired pages of Hulk and X-Men and Thor and Fantastic Four from a single Manhattan dugout of Stan Lee?s clever invention. Like they were the perpetual-champ Yankees or something, all playing together in the House of Ideas That Stan Built. ?There was no bullpen,? Ayers would smile, before describing the humble Marvel offices of the Silver Age.
And yet, though so many of the Stan-nicknamed freelancers worked from elsewhere, the decades have fully brought into focus how much these early Marvel mates were like the oft-nicknamed Yankees, and how ?Daring? Dick Ayers was one gifted part of a Murderers? Row of mad talent. Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko may have shined the brightest the soonest under Stan Lee?s editorship, but dozens, of course, made the history-making machine hum.