Don Heck

Don Heck
Born	January 2, 1929(1929-01-02) Queens, New York City, New York, USA
Died	February 23, 1995(1995-02-23) (aged 66)
Nationality	American
Area(s)	Penciller
Notable works	The Avengers Iron Man

Don Heck (January 2,^[1] 1929 – February 23, 1995) was an American comic book artist best known for co-creating the Marvel Comics character Iron Man, and for his long run penciling the Marvel superhero-team series The Avengers during the 1960s Silver Age of comic books.

Biography

Early life and career

Heck's earliest known comics credits: Weird Terror #1(Sept. 1952): Cover, plus "Hitler's Head"

Born in the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens, New York City, New York, Don Heck learned art through correspondence courses as well as at Woodrow Wilson Vocational High School in Jamaica and at Brooklyn Community College. He continued with an impromptu education in 1949 when a college friend recommended him for a job at Harvey Comics, repurposing newspaper comic strip Photostats into comic-book form — including the work of Heck's idol, famed cartoonist Milton Caniff, whose art Heck's would later resemble. One co-worker in the Harvey production department was future comics-art notable Pete Morisi.

Heck left Harvey after a year, and after taking his art samples to comic book companies chosen at random, he landed freelance assignments for Quality Comics, Hillman Comics, and Toby Press. Heck's first known credited work is on the horror comics Weird Terror, Horrific, Terrific, and Danger, and the violent Western series Death Valley, for publisher Comic Media beginning in 1952. Publisher Allen Hardy was a former co-worker at Harvey Comics. For publisher U.S. Pictorial, circa 1955, he drew the one-shot Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion, a TV tie-in comic, possibly a Heinz giveaway, based on the 1955-57 syndicated, live-action kids' show of that name.

Atlas Comics

Through his colleague Pete Morisi, Heck met Stan Lee, editor-in-chief and art director of Timely Comics, and subsequently Atlas Comics, the two forerunners of Marvel Comics. Heck became an Atlas staff artist on September 1, 1954; his first known work for the company was the six-page Korean War story "The Commies Attack!" in Battlefront #29 (March 1955). He as well drew Westerns, crime fiction, horror, and jungle stories. During a 1957 business retrenchment, when Atlas let go of most of its staff and freelancers, Heck worked for 18 months designing model airplanes.

Tales of Suspense #1 (Jan. 1959). Cover art by Don Heck.

Atlas began revamping in late 1958 with the arrival of artist Jack Kirby, a comics legend whose career was also in need of revamping, and who threw himself into the anthological science fiction, supernatural mystery, and giant-monster stories of what would become known as "pre-superhero Marvel." Heck returned alongside other soon-to-be-famous names of Marvel Comics' 1960s emergence as a pop culture phenomenon, making his first splash with the cover of Tales of Suspense #1 (Jan. 1959). one of the very few of that time not drawn by Kirby.

In the years immediately preceding the arrival of the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and the other popular heroes of Marvel's ascendancy, Heck gave atmospheric rendering to numerous science fictopm jungle/prison-escape stories and other genres, Strange Tales and Tales to Astonish, to name two of the many pre-superhero comics for which he drew; others included Strange Worlds, World of Fantasy, and Journey into Mystery. Many of these stories were reprinted during the 1960s and 1970s. Heck, who was known for drawing beautiful women, also contributed to such Atlas/Marvel romance comics as Love Romances and My Own Romance.

Comics artist Jerry Ordway, describing this era of Heck's work, called the the artist "truly under-appreciated ... His Atlas work (pre-Marvel) was terrific, with a clean sharp style, and an ink line that wouldn't quit."^[2]

Silver Age

Iron Man premiered in Tales of Suspense #39 (March 1963) as a collaboration among editor and story-plotter Lee, scripter Larry Lieber, story-artist Heck, and Kirby, who provided the cover pencils and designed the first Iron Man armor. Kirby "designed the costume," Heck recalled, "because he was doing the cover. The covers were always done first. But I created the look of the characters, like Tony Stark and his secretary Pepper Potts." ^[3] Comics historian and former Kirby assistant Mark Evanier, investigating claims of Kirby's involvement in the creation of both Iron Man and Daredevil, interviewed Kirby and Heck on the subject, years before their deaths, and concluded that Kirby

...definitely did not do full breakdowns as has been erroneously reported about ... the first 'Iron Man'. [In the early 1970s], Jack claimed to have laid out those stories, and I repeated his claim in print — though not before checking with Heck, who said, in effect, 'Oh, yeah. I remember that. Jack did the layouts'. We all later realized he was mistaken. ... Both also believed that Jack had contributed to the plots of those debut appearances — recollections that do not match those of Stan Lee. (Larry Lieber did the script for the first Iron Man story from a plot that Stan gave him.) Also, in both cases, Jack had already drawn the covers of those issues and done some amount of design work. He came up with the initial look of Iron Man's armor ...^[4]

Heck original art for splash page, Tales of Suspense #53 (Jan. 1964)

Heck presided over the first appearance of Hawkeye, Marvel's archer supreme, in Tales of Suspense #57 (Sept. 1964), and femme fatale Communist spy and future superheroine and S.H.I.E.L.D. agent the Black Widow in #52 (April 1964).

Heck drew the feature through issue #46 (Oct. 1963), after which Spider-Man artist Steve Ditko introduced the familiar red-and-gold Iron Man armor and drew the feature for three issues. Heck returned with #50 — which introduced Iron Man's arch-foe, the Mandarin — and continued through #72 (Dec. 1965).

Concurrent with drawing Iron Man, Heck succeeded Jack Kirby as penciler on The Avengers with issue #9 (Oct. 1964), the introduction of Wonder Man.

Later career

Heck inked his own pencils for many years. However, when struggling to adjust to the "Marvel method" of doing comics — in which the penciler plotted and paced the details of a story based on a synopsis or plot outline from the writer, who would afterward add dialog — and Marvel's explosion of superhero titles, he was assigned the help of an inker for the first time. He successfully made this adjustment, and went on to be one of the most remembered artists of Marvel's The Avengers in the mid-1960s. Eventually, he returned to inking his own work in The Avengers #32-37.

At DC Comics, Heck drew Wonder Woman #204 (Jan.–Feb. 1973) in which the character's powers and traditional costume were restored after several years.^[5] With writer Gerry Conway, Heck co-created, Steel, the Indestructible Man in the premiere issue (March 1978) of the titular comic.^[6] After the cancellation of Steel, Heck drew The Flash.^[7] In 1982, Heck would reunite with Conway on the Justice League of America including that year's crossover with the All-Star Squadron.^[8] After leaving the JLA, Heck returned to Wonder Woman and drew the title until its cancellation in 1986.^[7]

He also penciled three issues of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu for Millennium Publications.

Marvel one-time editor-in-chief Roy Thomas said of the artist,

Don was unlucky enough, I think, to be a non-superhero artist who, starting in the sixties, had to find his niche in a world dominated by superheroes. Fortunately, as he proved first with Iron Man and then with the Avengers, Don could rise to the occasion because he had real talent and a good grounding in the fundamentals. He amalgamated into his own style certain aspects of Jack Kirby's style, and carved out a place for himself as one of a handful of artists who were of real importance during the very early days of Marvel".^[2]

Heck died of lung cancer.

References

1. ^ Comics Buyer's Guide #1650; February 2009; Page 107
2. ^ ^{a b} POV Online (column of March 24, 1995): "Don Heck", by Mark Evanier
3. ^ Daniels, Les, Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World's Greatest Comics (Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1991), p. 99
4. ^ Evanier, Mark (undated). "The Jack FAQ". P.O.V. Online (column). http://povonline.com/jackfaq/JackFaq4.htm. 
5. ^ McAvennie, Michael; Dolan, Hannah, ed. (2010). "1970s". DC Comics Year By Year A Visual Chronicle. Dorling Kindersley. p. 154. ISBN 978-0-7566-6742-9. "After nearly five years of Diana Prince's non-powered super-heroics, writer-editor Robert Kanigher and artist Don Heck restored Wonder Woman's. . .well, wonder." 
6. ^ McAvennie p. 177 "Thanks to scripter Gerry Conway and artist Don Heck, the red, white, and blue shone like never before - on the steel-alloyed suit of the World War II cyborg, Steel."
7. ^ ^{a b} Don Heck's DC Comics credits at the Grand Comics Database
8. ^ Thomas, Roy (2000). "The Justice League-Justice Society Team-Ups". The All-Star Companion. TwoMorrows Publishing. pp. 191-192. ISBN 1-893905-05-5.  Justice League of America #207-209 (Oct.-Dec. 1982) and All-Star Squadron #14-15 (Oct.-Nov. 1982)

External links

• Don Heck at the Lambiek Comiclopedia
• The American Artist Bluebook: Don Heck
• The Grand Comics Database
• DonHeck.com (fan site). WebCitation archive.
• The Silver Age Marvel Comics Cover Index: Don Heck (15 representative covers)
• Don Heck at the Internet Movie Database

Persondata
Name	Heck, Don
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	January 2, 1929
Place of birth	Queens, New York City, New York, USA
Date of death	February 23, 1995
Place of death