Bill Lignante, R.I.P.

We're just now hearing that the fine comic book/strip illustrator Bill Lignante passed away on February 27 this year, three weeks before what would have been his 93rd birthday. Bill worked on many projects in many fields but is probably best remembered for his association with Lee Falk's long-running character, The Phantom. Bill drew and occasionally wrote a long run of comic books of The Phantom across three different publishers, and was also a fill-in artist for the newspaper strip. He ghosted or assisted on other newspaper strips as well, including Ozark Ike, King of the Royal Mounted and Red Ryder.

Bill didn't do much in comic books besides The Phantom. For Gold Key, he did a few TV-based comics like The Girl From UNCLE and Secret Agent. In 1968, he briefly tried working for Marvel and penciled at least one issue of a Doctor Doom comic book they were planning to launch then. Alas, he did not get along with Stan Lee or with the Marvel method of doing comics. Bill departed and Marvel tried two other artists on the project before canceling plans for the comic.

Bill worked a lot as a layout artist and designer in animation, mostly at Hanna-Barbera. For them, he worked on dozens of shows including Jonny Quest, Scooby Doo, Dynomutt, Jabberjaw, Super Friends and Laff-a-Lympics. A lot of folks think that Alex Toth did all the designs on the super-hero shows that came out of H-B but though Alex did more of the designs of the main characters, Bill probably did a larger percentage of the overall design work on those programs.  On Super Friends, some characters like Superman and Aquaman usually looked more like the way Bill drew them than the way Alex drew them.  Bill also worked for Filmation on their Superman cartoons and for Ruby-Spears on Plastic Man and other series.

He spoke more often of two gigs he had outside of comics and animation. Bill was at times a courtroom sketch artist for ABC Television, covering (among others) the trials of Angela Davis, Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan, Daniel Ellsberg, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, John DeLorean, William Calley and Rodney King. He would sit in a courtroom during the proceedings, sketching like mad.  Then he would have to bang out finished color drawings in time for the evening news coverage. It was a challenge he very much enjoyed.

He was also one of the main renderers of the famous celebrity caricatures that adorned the walls of The Palm restaurant in Beverly Hills, downtown Los Angeles and other cities.  He told me he loved that job because he was "paid well" — not so much in money but in free food and drink at The Palm.

I had a brief telephone and pen-pal relationship with Bill before meeting him at a couple of Comic-Con Internationals in San Diego and interviewing him once on a panel there.  He was a delightful man who managed to be both very proud of his work and very humble at the same time. I'm sad to hear of his passing and I wished I'd known it at the time.