Dick Calkins

Richard William Calkins (1894 to 1962), who often signed his work Lt. Dick Calkins, was an American comic strip artist best known as the first artist to draw the Buck Rogers comic strip. Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he graduated from the Chicago Art Institute and worked as a cartoonist for the Detroit Free Press before serving in the Army Air Service as a pilot and flight instructor during World War I. After the war he was an editorial cartoonist for the Chicago American until 1929, the year he began drawing Buck Rogers. He is credited as the strip's artist from January 1929 to November 1947 and as its writer from September 1939 to November 1947, although other sources indicate he stopped drawing it around 1932. He also co-created the aviation comic strip Skyroads with the pioneer aviator Lester J. Maitland, wrote for the Buck Rogers radio program, and died in Tucson, Arizona, in 1962.