Al Williamson - Definition and Overview

Al Williamson is an American cartoonist of partly Hispanic descent. During the 1950's at the age of 21 he began working for EC Comics which became the publisher of Mad Magazine. For a while he worked in a studio with Frank Frazetta, Roy G. Krenkel, and others which was responsible for a lot of the fantasy illustration coming out of New York City. According to Jim Keefe's website, in 1960 he went to work as an assistant to John Prentice on the comic strip Rip Kirby. Some work from that strip has been published as having been worked on by him from 1964. In the 1960's, he worked briefly on a Flash Gordon comic book which was published by King Features and remains a very collectible comic book. In 1967, he took over the long-running Secret Agent X-9 comic strip with writer Archie Goodwin, and remained on it until 1980. At the start of their tenure the name was changed to Secret Agent Corrigan. When the Dino Di Laurentis Flash Gordon movie came out, he did a 3-issue comic book adaptation before taking over the Star Wars comic strip from Russ Manning. In 1999 he actually got a chance to work on the comic strip Flash Gordon, a lifelong dream of his, when the regular cartoonist, Jim Keefe, asked for his help on a page and gave him credit for his 'art assist'.

External link

• Jim Keefe's account of Williamson's Flash Gordon page. (http://www.keefestudios.com/studio/williamson/williamson.htm)