Dick Dillin - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Dick Dillin was born in in Watertown, New York. Determined since childhood to draw for comics, Dillin graduated from Watertown High School to become an art student at Syracuse University on the GI Bill, following his military service with the 8th U.S. Army in Tokyo, Yokohama, and Okinawa. Sometime after marrying wife Estella in 1948, Dillin left his job at a Watertown manufacturer of air brakes for trains, and sought an art career in New York City. Six months later, after having done magazine illustration and other commercial art and gaining a foothold at Fawcett Comics and Fiction House, he relocated his family to suburban Peekskill, New York.

Dillin's art at Fawcett (on features including "Lance O'Casey" and "Ibis the Invincible" in Whiz Comics) and Fiction House ("Buzz Bennett", "Space Rangers") led to drawing for Quality Comics, beginning in 1952. He worked particularly on the popular title Blackhawk but also on G.I. Combat, Love Confessions, and Love Secrets. When Quality went out of business, Dillin, searching for new work, eventually tried DC Comics — where he saw one or more issues of Blackhawk on the desk as he was being interviewed, and to his relief was told, "We've been trying to get in touch with you."

Read more about this topic:  Dick Dillin

Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:

    Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fail that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing “fixes” a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child’s long life ahead.
    James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)

    Life is the desert, life the solitude,
    Death joins us to the great majority.
    Edward Young (1683–1765)

    Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.
    Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964)