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Arnold Drake, WWII Veteran and Comics Creator, Dies at 83

by PAMELA DRAKE, KEN GALE and MARC SWENSON

Arnold Drake, a WWII veteran and creator of comics titles for DC and Marvel Comics in the 1960’s, died Monday at Cabrini Medical Center in Manhattan. He was 83.

He enlisted in the Army in 1942 and served in the Signal Corps with Patton’s 101st Regiment, notably in the Battle of the Bulge. He once held a French village single-handedly for 12 hours, until reinforcements could arrive with the U.S. flag. He received two medals from the Army for his service, but as an ardent pacifist, he returned them.

In 1950, after attending New York University and the University of Missouri, Drake wrote the first graphic novel published in the U.S., It Rhymes With Lust, with art by Matt Baker, the first major Black cartoonist in the comics industry. It is being republished this month by Dark Horse Publications.

In the mid-1950’s, Drake began a long stint at DC Comics, publishers of BATMAN, which he wrote together with several other writers during the 1960’s. During this time, he also created Deadman, The Doom Patrol, Stanley and His Monster and the character “Beast Boy,” who is now a popular member of the “Teen Titans” cartoon on television. A longtime member of the Writers Guild of America, Drake led writers at DC in a strike for health benefits and better wages. The failure of this effort led to his leaving DC for Marvel Comics in 1968.

At Marvel, Drake wrote for several superhero titles, notably The Fantastic Four and The X-Men (which, ironically, had originally appeared four months after Drake’s first Doom Patrol issue, with a very similar cast of characters). He created Guardians of the Galaxy during his stint at Marvel and wrote origin stories for most of the original X-Men characters.

It was Drake’s move from Marvel to Gold Key Comics in the 1970’s that found him doing art as well as script, in the form of storyboards (drawings of comic pages) for Little Lulu. He also wrote Grimm’s Ghost Stories, The Twilight Zone, Boris Karloff, Star Trek, O.G. Whiz and other titles during his time at Gold Key.

In the late 1970’s, Mr. Drake became National Executive Director of the Veterans Bedside Network, a nonprofit organization which uses dramatic re-enactments of television scripts such as M*A*S*H, involving VA hospital patients, as therapy and entertainment. He held this post for seven years.

Drake was the recipient of two Alley Awards for comics excellence in 1967 and the first recipient of the Bill Finger Award in 2005.

He is survived by his daughter Pamela and twin granddaughters, Anastasia and Tatiana.