Ron Smith

Ron Smith (???, 1924-January 10, 2019) was a British comic artist and RAF Spitfire pilot during the Second World War. While forbidden as a teenager to go to art college, in 1947 he managed to get work at the Gaumont British Animation Studio and moved to London to work in comics from 1949.

While he worked on numerous comics and genres (and album covers for Def Leppard and Sigue Sigue Sputnik), he is most famous for his work on 2000AD's Judge Dredd strips from the 1970s to 1990s, in particular drawing the bulk of the Dredd newspaper strips for the Daily Star. After his death on 10 January 2019, 2000AD called him "one of the five iconic Dredd artists" of the 1980s.^[1]

He drew several strips for Marvel UK's Zoids with Grant Morrison and Ian Rimmer, M.A.S.K., and Transformers. While his only Transformers strips was #82, it is notable for depicting the first full appearance of the Wreckers and makes him the co-creator of Rack'n'Ruin.

Credited art

• "Target: 2006"

Notes

• Smith famously got around the low pay for comic artists by using an alarm clock. In a 2009 interview, he said: "They said to me a page of cartoons is ten pound and I had worked out that to survive in London I needed two pounds an hour, so you just divide one into the other and so you’ve got to do a page in five hours. So you set the clock, and you may not finish it but you start to get into this rhythm. It used to be three pages, not six, and when I finished I was up to twenty pounds an hour – two hundred pounds a page, ten hours... When it went ping I would literally put that page down and start on the next one. And then I would go back and sit up late at night, which is outside of my hours, and finish it off. But this got me into this way of working that meant that I could live this little middle-class life with four daughters, put them through school and on to university."^[2]

References