In this post, this post and this one, I put up the covers of the comics Dell published in the sixties about on Adlai Stevenson, Barry Goldwater, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and The Beatles. Here's what I think is the only other one they did…the John F. Kennedy comic. It came out in 1964 following the assassination and it was drawn by John Tartaglione. (Tartaglione, by the way, drew the Lyndon Johnson comic, not Jack Sparling.) Earlier, before they severed ties with Western Publishing, Dell published three other biographical comics…one of Abraham Lincoln that was drawn mainly by John Buscema, and then they did the life stories of Annette Funicello (illustrated by Sparky Moore) and the Lennon Sisters (with art by Alex Toth). What do these people have in common?
Despite what you see above, there was no comic book biography of Richard Nixon published by Dell. The cover you see is a phony that I couldn't resist whipping up. Interestingly, a number of people wrote to accuse me of faking the Adlai Stevenson comic book but that one was real.
A brief, not-too-off-topic memory: Around 1984, I made a deal with a comic book publisher to do a Nixon bio-comic, not in the wholesome Dell style but with some grit and commentary. It would not have been flattering, as I didn't think much of the man, but I believe it would have been fair and accurate. It just seemed to me that his life and career had a fascinating story arc that could be told effectively in the comic book format and I wanted to try. We had artists lined up to draw the interior and Jack Davis had agreed to paint a cover…but then the publisher had some business setbacks and the book was never done. I'd forgotten all about it until just now when I was Photoshopping the Nixon cover together and I got to thinking that it would have been an interesting thing to write and, I'd like to think, to read.