Today is the 84th anniversary of Don Heck’s birth. One of the more skilled Milton Caniff acolytes of comics’ Golden Age, history has been unkind to Heck due to his less than stellar super-hero work toward the end of the artist’s stellar career.
(Gary Groth and Harlan Ellison once cruelly dismissed the artist as the “worst … in the field,” apparently ignorant of the fact that Heck suffered from diminished vision in his later years and still turned in work on time.)
A good summation of Heck’s career, and importance to the early years of what would later be labeled the “Marvel Age of Comics,” can be found here. In the meantime, here’s a tale from Heck’s earlier days featuring two-fisted wildcat oil men.
From Danger #1 (Comic Media, January 1953), here’s “Black Gold.”