A BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE to a comics workhorse… By PAUL KUPPERBERG For every comic book Mount Rushmore, there’s a face just out of frame, quietly doing the heavy lifting while flashier names soak up the spotlight. In Marvel Comics’ formative years, that face belonged to Don Heck (January 2, 1929 – February 23, 1995), to my mind the most overlooked of the original Marvel artists working alongside Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Heck got his start working in the production department at Harvey Comics before following fellow employee Allen Hardy over to newly formed publisher Comic Media, where he produced his first work for comics, the cover and an 8-page story for War Fury #1 (September 1952). He freelanced for a variety of publishers, including Quality and Hillman, before arriving at Marvel (then Atlas) in 1954 and he would stay through the company’s explosive Silver Age growth, proving his versatility by working across an impressive range of genres. Don drew everything the company put in front of him: crime stories with hard, unsentimental edges; war tales that emphasized mood and human cost over spectacle; Westerns populated by weary lawmen and moral gray areas; and romance comics that required a deft touch with facial expression and body language. While Kirby thundered and Ditko brooded, Heck’s work was clean and clear — with distinctive characters, storytelling with expressive figures, and an intuitive sense of pacing. And while it was Jack Kirby who drew the cover to Tales of Suspense #39 (March 1963) and designed the gray armor that introduced Iron Man to the world, it was Don who “created the look of the characters, like Tony Stark and his secretary Pepper Potts,” according to the artist in Les Daniels’ Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics (Abrams, 1991). I liked Don Heck’s work in those early Marvel years. He wasn’t explosive like Kirby or idiosyncratic like Ditko, but his style was distinctive and solid, and he finally cemented his place in the Marvel Universe when he took over as penciller on The Avengers, beginning with the ninth issue (October 1964). He was all over that universe across the 1960s: In addition to Iron Man and The Avengers, he did the Ant-Man strip in Tales to Astonish; The X-Men, The Amazing Spider-Man, and Captain Marvel, as well as an endless stream...