Ric Estrada, R.I.P.

Mark Evanier reports that comic book artist Ric Estrada has passed away at age 81. A note from his wife Loretta, with details of the funeral in Provo, Utah, is posted on Daniel Best's site. Steve Bissette, a student at the Kubert School while Estrada was a teacher there, shares some warm memories at his site.

Go over here for a good list of his work at DC, where he was a mainstay on the romance comics and the war comics, as well as doing most of the run of RICHARD DRAGON, some super-hero stuff in WONDER WOMAN and a few other things, and late in his career some work in AMETHYST.

Back in the 1950s, Estrada did a pair of stories for Harvey Kurtzman's war titles at EC. One is set in his native Cuba, featuring Teddy Roosevelt, and the other was a Korean War story.

In one of a handful of stories he wrote as well as drew for DC in the 1970s, he returned to Roosevelt and San Juan Hill.

Here are two of his romance covers for DC. I'm not too familiar with that line, but this stuff does look well designed. And just for the heck of it, there's a page he drew for DC's 1980s AMETHYST series, some of his last regular comics work, doing a good job of following co-creator Ernie Colon.

Estrada was the main artist for a regular back-up feature in the DC war books of the 1970s, "Robert Kanigher's Gallery of War", drawing 31 of the 49 stories published under that banner (which reminds me, now that geocities is officially going away, I have to post the stuff I have hosted there to someplace I can actually update it, and put up way better scans). "The Fourth Death" was a very chilling concentration camp story. "Winter Soldier" was a great little historical drama about George Washington. "The Wild Piper", that was just strange, but check out that nice bit of aerial combat.

BLITZKRIEG was a shortlived title from DC in the mid-1970s, telling war stories with German soldiers as the central characters (plus some more historical stories of "The Huns"). Great little off-beat series, and Estrada was the main artist on the book, doing a wonderful job with Kanigher's scripts.

As Evanier mentions, in addition to his comics work, Estrada worked in animation for quite a while, and lots of other fields. Back in the 1990s he also wrote a series of essays on his life as a "Hitchhiker in comics" for Robin Snyder's newsletter THE COMICS, which were enormously entertaining (like his first encounter with Robert Kanigher in the 1950s, and the reason he only did that one story for DC back in the 1950s), so it should be interesting to see more about the documentary his son Seth is working on. Anyway, rest in peace, Mr. Estrada, and thanks for the entertaining work on the stops you made along the way in your hitchhiking.