Al McWilliams

Alden Spurr McWilliams generally credited as Al McWilliams and A. McWilliams (February 2, 1916 – March 19, 1993), was an American comics artist who co-created the first African-American lead character of a comic strip. He won the National Cartoonists Society's 1978 award for Comic Book: Story.

Early life and career McWillams was born in New York City, the son of chauffeur John and piano teacher Florence L. McWilliams. His sister Faith was born in 1921. By 1929, the family, of Irish ancestry, had moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, where John McWilliams became a radio-company chemist's laboratory assistant. Al McWilliams graduated from Greenwich High School in 1934, and that September began attending the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts, which later became the Parsons School of Design. In 1938, he began illustrating for such pulp magazines as Clues Detective Stories and Flying Aces, where for three years he wrote and drew biographies of famed flyers in a single-page comic strip, They Had What It Takes. Other early credits, all for Dell, include the feature "Crime Busters" a.k.a. "The Crime Busters with Al Brady", in The Funnies; "Speed Bolton: Air Ace" and "Stratosphere Jim” a.k.a. "Stratosphere Jim and his Flying Fortress" in Crackajack Funnies; and the radio-show spinoff "Gang Busters" in Popular Comics and Four Color. and upon returning to the US in 1946 From 1961 to 1968, he drew the sea-adventure strip Davy Jones, a spinoff of Sam Leff's Curley Kayoe.

Original black-and-white art, signed "A. McWilliams" and inscribed "Al McWilliams", for the Dateline: Danger! color comic strip of Sunday, March 16, 1969. The series' co-star, Danny Raven, was the first African-American lead character of a comic strip.

McWilliams and writer John Saunders' Dateline: Danger!, which ran from 1968 to 1974, introduced the first African-American lead character of a comic strip, Danny Raven, co-star of this adventure series about two intelligence agents working undercover as reporters.

Other comic-strip work includes the Star Trek and Buck Rogers strips.