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:

    Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “From those constellations turn
    Your eyes, and sleep; for every man
    Is living; and for peace upon
    His life should rest;
    This must everybody learn
    For mutual happiness; that trust
    Alone is best.”
    Philip Larkin (1922–1986)

    My ambition in life: to become successful enough to resume my career as a neurasthenic.
    Mason Cooley (b. 1927)