Harry Lampert, the artistic co-creator of The Flash, died this morning at age 88. The cause was listed as a cerebral hemorrhage, but he had been in failing health for the past few months, battling cancer and undergoing treatments at a hospital near his home in Florida. A native of New York, Harry showed early artistic talent and by age sixteen was working at the Max Fleischer animation studio, primarily as an inker and clean-up artist for Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons. One day, he heard about a way to pick up extra money…drawing for these new things called "comic books." Harry begin moonlighting, and eventually working full-time for some of the earliest "shop" enterprises, thereby becoming one of the true pioneers of the field. He mostly drew "funny" comics but as the industry turned towards superheroes, he did a few of them, too. The most notable came in 1940 when editor Sheldon Mayer at the All-American company (later absorbed by DC) was assembling a new book called Flash Comics.
Mayer needed someone to draw the title character, a super-speedster devised by writer Gardner Fox. Lampert got the job but was not happy drawing in that style. Little suspecting it was the feature with which his name would be forever linked, he asked off after two stories and Mayer, who knew he had miscast Harry, happily replaced him. Lampert moved on to funnier features (including filler gag pages for many of the company's books) and later out of comic books and into magazine gag cartoons for, among many others, Saturday Review and The Saturday Evening Post. In the late forties, he segued into advertising work, where he enjoyed great success and eventually formed his own agency.
Cartooning was only one of his passions. Another was bridge, a game at which he became so expert that after retiring from cartooning in the mid-seventies, he wrote several books and a syndicated column on the topic. In the eighties, comic book fans tracked him down and he began appearing at conventions, selling newly-created sketches of The Flash. The last few years of his life, he bounced back and forth between bridge tournaments and comic-cons, happily signing autographs and marketing his wares at both. I enjoyed talking with the man and interviewing him on panels, and I'm sure glad we all got the chance to meet and know him.