Donald "Don" L. Heck (January 2, 1929 – February 23, 1995) was an American comics artist best known for co-creating the Marvel Comics characters Iron Man, the Wasp, Black Widow, Hawkeye and Wonder Man and for his long run penciling the Marvel superhero-team series The Avengers during the 1960s Silver Age of comic books.
Early life
thumb|left|One of Heck's earliest known comics credits: Weird Terror #1 (Sept. 1952): Cover, plus the story "Hitler's Head".
Heck was born in the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens, New York City, the son of Bertha and John Heck, of German descent. After impressing his parents with sketches of Donald Duck, they enrolled him in art correspondence courses before he began studies at Woodrow Wilson Vocational High School in Jamaica, and at a community college in Brooklyn. when at the recommendation of a college friend, he landed a job at Harvey Comics.
Career
At Harvey Comics he repurposed newspaper comic strip Photostats into comic-book form – including the work of Heck's idol, famed cartoonist Milton Caniff.
Heck remained at Harvey, where one co-worker in the production department was future comics artist Pete Morisi, Heck's first known comics work appeared in two Comic Media titles both cover-dated September 1952: the war comic War Fury #1, for which he penciled and inked the cover and the eight-page story "The Unconquered", by an unknown writer; and the cover and the six-page story "Hitler's Head", also by an unknown writer, in the horror comic Weird Terror #1. Heck's work continued to appear in those titles and in the horror anthology Horrific, for which he designed the logo; the adventure-drama anthology Danger; the Western anthology Death Valley; and other titles through the company's demise in late 1954.
Atlas Comics
Through his old Harvey Comics colleague Pete Morisi, Heck in 1954 met Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee, then editor-in-chief and art director of Marvel's 1950 predecessor, Atlas Comics. As Heck recalled