Veteran comic book artist and illustrator Lee J. Ames died last week at a nursing home in Huntington, New York at the age of 90. The cause of death was congestive heart failure.
Born in Manhattan, he began working for local art studios while still in high school. In 1939, he entered a contest the Disney organization was running to find new artists, won and briefly relocated to Los Angeles where he worked in a minor capacity on Fantasia and Pinocchio. But he got homesick, went back to the east and got into comics, working for Bernard Baily (who drew The Spectre and other strips for DC) and for the Eisner-Iger shop. Over the years, Ames worked for most of the major publishers including Timely, Archie, Harvey, Hillman and EC, and he was a major contributor to Classics Illustrated in the fifties.
In the sixties, he turned more to advertising and book work, enjoying immense success with a line of "how to draw" books. Many were in a series called the "Draw 50" series such as Draw Fifty People, Draw Fifty Vehicles, and Draw Fifty Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals. His last few decades were spent mostly producing those books and with lecture and teaching jobs that sprang from his many books.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Lee on a panel at the 2005 Comic-Con International in San Diego. He was a jolly man who clearly loved drawing and loved teaching others how to draw. It's always sad to lose someone like that.