Don Heck

Don Heck
Don Heck in the 1960s
Born	(1929-01-02)January 2, 1929 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
Signature

Donald L. "Don" Heck (January 2, 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.

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 a community college in Brooklyn. He continued with an impromptu art education in December 1949 when at the recommendation of a college friend he landed 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.

Heck remained at Harvey, where one co-worker in the production department was future comics artist Pete Morisi, for two-and-a-half years until a Harvey employee, Allen Hardy, broke off "to start his own line, Media Comics [sic; actually Comic Media], in 1952," Heck recalled in 1993. "He called me up and asked me to join." Heck's first known comics work appeared in two Comic Media titles both cover-dated September 1952: the war comic War Fury #1, for which he penciled and inked the cover and the eight-page story "The Unconquered", by an unknown writer; and the cover and the six-page story "Hitler's Head", also by an unknown writer, in the horror comic Weird Terror #1. Heck's work continued to appear in those titles and in the horror anthology Horrific, for which he designed the logo; the adventure-drama anthology Danger; and the Western anthology Death Valley and other titles through the company's demise in late 1954.