Howard Purcell (November 10, 1918 – April 24, 1981) was an American comics artist and writer active from the 1940s Golden Age of Comic Books through the 1960s Silver Age. A longtime penciler and cover artist for DC Comics, one of the field's two largest firms, he co-created the Golden Age characters Sargon the Sorcerer and the Gay Ghost (renamed in the 1970s the Grim Ghost) for All-American Publications, one of the companies, with National Comics and Detective Comics, that merged to form DC. Purcell also drew the famous cover of Green Lantern #1 (Fall 1941). Biography Early life and career Howard Purcell, whose early influences included the adventure comic strip artists Hal Foster and Alex Raymond, as well as illustrators Harvey Dunn and Dean Cornwell, took art classes at the Art Students League of New York. He worked as an animator in New York City studios before entering the comics industry, where his earliest known credit is National's Adventure Comics #53 (Aug. 1940), for which he wrote and drew the six-page feature "Mark Lansing". The titular adventurer's exploits with subterranean races and other science fiction conceits ran through issue #62. By that time Purcell had drawn the cover of All-American Publications' All Star Comics #2 (Fall 1940) – reprinted as the cover of DC Comics' quirkily numbered, 2006 hardcover collection All Star Archives #0 – as well as the feature "Lando, Man of Magic" in World's Best Comics #1 (Spring 1941), and both the Green Lantern cover of, and the humorous adventure feature "Red, White and Blue" in, All-American Comics #25 (April 1941). Purcell and writer John Wentworth created Sargon the Sorcerer in the following month's issue. A minor character in what would become the DC Universe, Sargon was John Sargent, whose exposure to the "Ruby of Life" during infancy granted him magical powers that he used in adulthood to fight crime, keeping his supernatural abilities camouflaged in his guise as a stage magician. Purcell and Wentworth continued with the character through All-American Comics #50 (June 1943). With writer Gardner Fox, Purcell created the Gay Ghost in All-American's Sensation Comics #1 (Jan. 1942). The character, renamed the Grim Ghost in the 1970s, was similar to National Comics' the Spectre in that he was a ghost (of Keith Everet, the fictional 18th-century Earl of Strethmere) who inhabited the body of a modern man, Charles Collins, to fight injustice – although