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The Yancy Street Gang Visits DICK & LINDY AYERS How The Artist Of Sgt. Fury And Ghost Rider Met His Greatest Fans—And Lived To Tell The Tale! by Barry Pearl, F.F.F.
O
ne Saturday in January 2008, the Yancy Street Gang—Nick Caputo, Barry Pearl, and Mike Vassallo (“Doc V”)—visited the home of Dick and Lindy Ayers. It is in Westchester, just down the road from Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. Dick and Lindy have been living there for 50 years!
Dick Ayers had been an essential contributor to the beginning of the Marvel Age, inking many of the early stories of Fantastic Four, Avengers, and “Thor,” just to name a few. While Dick also penciled many of Marvel’s early super-heroes such as “The Human Torch” and “Giant-Man,” Dick will be most remembered for his work on the war and Western mags such as Sgt. Fury, Captain Savage, and Rawhide Kid.
Yancy Street Hath No Fury… Our colorful cast of kooky characters— flanking Dick (excuse us—Richard B.!) Ayers’ great cover for Sgt. Fury #81 (Nov. 1970). (Clockwise from right:) Dick & Lindy Ayers—Nick Caputo—Dr. Michael J. Vassallo (a.k.a. “Doc V.”)—& scribe Barry Pearl. The latter trio style themselves a latter-day Yancy Street Gang—and who’s gonna say them nay? Photos by Michael J. Vassallo & Barry Pearl. [Comic art ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.]
The first thing we did was crowd into the bedroom to watch a DVD on the Ayerses’ TV. Nick had discovered a DVD of the 1949 CBS-TV show called Suspense, one of the many crime shows that were popular at the time; it had originally been a very popular radio series. One Suspense episode on the DVD, “The Comic Strip Murders,” had the same basic storyline as the 1965 Jack Lemmon movie How to Murder Your Wife. The plot revolved around a comic strip artist, here played by Don Briggs, who draws a daily comic strip and who may be planning to murder his spouse! In the show, several comic strips by “Briggs’” are seen, and the artist’s hands are often shown drawing. The artist who created the strips—and whose hands were filmed doing the actual drawing—was Dick Ayers! On the TV show the artist’s assistant is played by Eva Marie Saint. Nick made Dick laugh when he asked, “Dick, how does this guy get Eva Marie Saint for an assistant, and you get Ernie Bache?“ We then discussed how few women there were in the comic book industry at that time. This was a live 30-minute broadcast, captured on film by using a kinescope, a motion picture camera that filmed the actual broadcast from a TV set. We also discussed the limitations and flaws of doing live TV; this was brought on by observing the actual cameras moving in the background. Dick and Lindy were excited to get this DVD. Dick had never seen the show. In 1949 virtually all TV was live, and there were no VCRs.