Dick Ayers
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Dick Ayers A Life In The “Gowanus” A Conversation with One of Magazine Enterprises’ Best and Most Prolific Artists Interview conducted by Roy Thomas
Transcribed by Brian K. Morris smile of his, it looked like Clark Gable’s, and he said, “It’s the garbage in the canal.” The Gowanus Canal is the canal in Brooklyn where they dumped the garbage at the time, and that’s what he referred to comic books as. And Burne went into it more, and I argued more about it. But he let me in, and he taught me nights. It was wonderful. Then Joe Shuster came in. Not just to talk; he came in and he sat beside you and chatted with you, real nice. He’d just come in and visit like a regular guy. And, also, Marvin Stein taught there. He was Joe Shuster’s top honcho of the studio. It was Marvin, really, who did all the work and he passed on everything. He gave out the assignments and Joe would come in, maybe once or twice a week. And then there was Ernie Bache, who was in my class; we had dinner together, and I would go down to the studio to visit him. And the next thing I knew, I was drawing. So I started out penciling. That would be the end of October, November 1947. RT: And so what did you start on?
Dick Ayers in 1949 at the drawing board doing “The Ghost Rider”—from Cartoonist PROfiles #59.—plus a 1994 illo of his most famous co-creation, the original Ghost Rider. [Art ©2001 Dick Ayers; Ghost Rider ©2001 Marvel Characters, Inc.]
[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is projected as the first of at least two interviews with Dick Ayers on his career in comics. The second, longer one—including a considerable part of this interview which we didn’t have room to print this time around—will be published in a near-future issue of Alter Ego and will deal in particular with Dick’s work for Timely/Marvel.—RT.] ROY THOMAS: You actually wound up getting into Magazine Enterprises by the back door, didn’t you? DICK AYERS: I saw a poster—Burne Hogarth [artist of the Tarzan strip] was up on 89th Street, at a new school he started, Cartoonists and Illustrators School. This is like October. It had already started in September. Burne looked at my samples and he said, “Gee, Dick. You want to be in this comic book stuff?” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Don’t you know that’s the Gowanus of the industry?” RT: The what? AYERS: Yeah, the “Gowanus.” And my face went blank, just like yours right now. [laughs] And he laughed. That
AYERS: The Funnyman comic book. I’m doing that, and I guess around the first of the year, Joe tells me, “Vin Sullivan would like to see you.” So he sent me down to see Vin, and to take some samples. Vin had drawn a newspaper strip, Schnozzola, in the ’30s, about Jimmy Durante. My Jimmy Durante later is more or less modeled after what he drew. RT: You didn’t know that you were already working for Sullivan in a way— since Sullivan published Funnyman by Siegel and Shuster? AYERS: He did, but I never realized Funnyman was a Magazine Enterprises book. I never connected it, really. I thought I was working for Joe Shuster, which I was.