Reed Crandall  Reed Leonard Crandall (February 22, 1917 – September 13, 1982) was an American illustrator and penciller of comic books and magazines. He was best known for the 1940s Quality Comics' "Blackhawk" and for stories in EC Comics during the 1950s. Crandall was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2009. Reed Crandall was born in Winslow, Indiana, the son of Rayburn Crandall and wife. One cousin was reportedly official Grand Teton National Park resident artist and photographer Harrison Crandall.(There is no verification that Reed is related to Harrison Crandall) Crandall graduated from Newton High School in Newton, Kansas, in 1935, and then attended the Cleveland School of Art in Cleveland, Ohio, on a scholarship. He graduated in 1939. His father died in the spring of Crandall's freshman year at art school, which Crandall left temporarily to return to Kansas. His mother and sister moved to Cleveland during Crandall's junior year. With his schoolmate Frank Borth, Crandall found work painting signs on storefront windows. Crandall's art influences included the painters and commercial illustrators N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle and James Montgomery Flagg. Another classmate, the son of the president of the Cleveland-based Newspaper Enterprise Association syndicate, recommended Crandall for a job at NEA as a general art assistant, where Crandall drew maps and other supporting material. Following his desire to be a magazine illustrator, Crandall unsuccessfully made the rounds of glossy magazines in New York City and Philadelphia, and at some point did a small amount of work for a children's book publisher. Moving to New York with his mother and sister, Crandall found work in the fledgling medium of comic books, joining the Eisner and Iger Studio, an early comic-book packager that supplied complete, outsourced comics for publishers. Crandall drew for comic books from 1939 until 1973. His first work appears in comics from publisher Quality Comics, for which he drew stories starring such superheroes as the Ray (in "Smash Comics", beginning in 1941 and initially under the playful pseudonym E. Lectron) and Doll Man (first in "Feature Comics" in 1941, then in the character's own solo title). His earliest confirmed cover art is for Fiction House's "Fight Comics" #12 (April 1941) at the Grand Comics Database. Other early work includes inking the pencil art of future industry legend Jack Kirby on two of the earliest Captain America stories, "The Ageless Orientals That Wouldn't Die", in "Captain America Comics" #2 (April 1941), and "The Queer Case of the Murdering Butterfly and the Ancient Mummies" in #3 (May 1941).