Rick Yager

Richard Sidney Yager (October 23, 1909 - July 22, 1995) was an American cartoonist most famous for his work on the Buck Rogers comic strip during its heyday in the mid-20th century.

Rick Yager was born in Alton, Illinois on the banks of the Mississippi River. Later the family moved to Oak Park (which was also home to Frank Lloyd Wright and had many homes designed by him), and were neighbors to the Hemingway (Ernest Hemingway) and Burroughs (Edgar Rice Burroughs) families. As a young man Yager spent several summers working on ranches in Wyoming. His experiences there were to greatly influence his art and story telling later. He attended Oak Park High School where he played halfback on the football team. His lifelong love of football was to often manifest itself in his later comic strip work as well. After high school Yager attended the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago whose alumni include such notables as Walt Disney, Bill Mauldin, Georgia O'Keeffe, John Cullen Murphy, and Orson Welles.

Rick Yager was hired by the National Newspaper Syndicate in 1933 to work on the Sunday Buck Rogers page. Thus Yager began a 25-year run in which he was to be the backbone of the popular newspaper comic strip. One of Yager's first contributions to the strip was a series of rocket ships that appeared in the last panel of each page - some of these designs would later be licensed by other companies and made into Tootsietoy rocket ships and balsa wood construction kits that sold by the tens of thousands during the Buck Rogers merchandising craze of the mid-1930s. Another of Yager's early creations was the famous "Spider Ship" which was featured in the popular pop-up book "Buck Rogers in Strange Adventures of the Spider Ship". By 1936 the multi-talented Yager was not only the strip's artist, but the feature's writer as well. Yager was responsible for many of the strip's most memorable story lines. These stories were invariably accompanied by the beautifully streamlined rocket ships that were his trademark. One such rocket was the "El Dorado", a ship made entirely of gold. Yager also dreamed up many of the feature's most beloved characters, notably "Admiral Cornplaster", the mischievous little green alien who could climb walls and hang from ceilings thanks to his vacuum-cupped hands and feet.

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