NEW YORK — Murphy Anderson, a comic book artist best known for drawing superheroes for DC Comics from the 1950s to the ‘70s, died Oct. 22 in Somerset, N.J. He was 89.
The cause was heart failure, said his son, Murphy III.
Born in Asheville, N.C., on July 9, 1926, Murphy Anderson began drawing professionally in 1944 for Fiction House, a pulp publisher that had entered the comics field in the late 1930s.
He followed that with a two-year stint, from 1947 to 1949, on a “Buck Rogers” newspaper strip before landing at what would become his longtime home, DC Comics, which was known at the time as National Comics.
Mr. Anderson would pencil or ink nearly every major series the company published, including “Superman,” “Hawkman” and “The Brave and the Bold,” which introduced the Justice League of America. He also worked closely on a multitude of cover drawings with Julius Schwartz, the editor who revitalized DC’s superheroes in the mid-1950s.
With writer Gardner Fox, Mr. Anderson in 1964 created the sorceress Zatanna, the daughter of a hero magician who appeared in the first issue of Action Comics in 1938. Zatanna has been seen on various animated television series and in the live-action series “Smallville,” about Superman’s formative years.
Perhaps his best-known drawing was done outside the comic book industry, for the cover of the first issue of Ms. magazine, in 1972: a striking image of Wonder Woman under the headline “Wonder Woman for President.”