Stan Drake

Stanley Albert Drake, born November 9, 1921, in Brooklyn, New York, is best remembered as the original artist of the long-running newspaper strip *The Heart of Juliet Jones*. While still in high school, he worked behind a donut truck for a dollar a day. By age 17, he was selling illustrations to pulp magazines like *Popular Detective*. After two years of study at New York’s Art Students League, he served in the Pacific during World War II, doing public relations work for *Stars and Stripes*. Following the war, he ran a commercial art studio with a dozen illustrators before his friend Bob Lubbers encouraged him to try syndicated comics. Drake’s clean, elegant linework and expressive storytelling defined *Juliet Jones* from its 1953 debut, and he also drew the adventure strip *Kelly Green* and contributed to European albums. In comic books, he worked on *Solar, Man of the Atom* and *Eternal Warrior* for Valiant, among others. Drake died on March 10, 1997. He received the National Cartoonists Society’s Story Comic Strip Award in 1979 and was inducted into the Society’s Hall of Fame in 2000.