went down there. I grew up down there so I learned both English and Spanish at the same time. It was comic books that taught me to read both languages." At age nine, Williamson took an interest in comic strips via the Mexican magazine Paquin, which featured American strips as well as Underwater Empire by Argentine cartoonist Carlos Clemen. Later, Williamson was attracted to Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon strip after his mother took him to see the Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe movie serial. While living in Bogotá he met future cartoonist Adolfo Buylla, who befriended him and gave him artistic advice. At age 12, in 1943, Williamson moved with his mother to San Francisco, California; they later moved to New York. In the mid-1940s Williamson continued to pursue his interest in cartooning and began to take art classes with Tarzan cartoonist Burne Hogarth, and later at Hogarth's Cartoonists and Illustrators School. There he met future cartoonists Wally Wood and Roy Krenkel. According to Williamson, "Roy broadened my collecting horizons, he became my guide to all the great illustrators — the artists who directly influenced adventure cartoonists like [Alex] Raymond and [Hal] Foster. He showed me J.C. Coll, Franklin Booth, Joseph Franke, Dan Smith, Norman Lindsay, Fortunino Matania, and the great Blue Book illustrators like Herbert Morton Stoops and Frank Hoban." As he continued to learn about the cartooning field, he would visit the comic-book publisher Fiction House, meeting such artists as George Evans, Bob Lubbers, John Celardo, and Mort Meskin. Williamson's first professional work may have been helping Hogarth pencil some Tarzan Sunday pages in 1948, although Williamson, who had initially believed so, reconsidered in a 1983 interview and recalled that his Tarzan work had come after his first two pieces of comic-book art: providing spot illustrations for the story "The World's Ugliest Horse" in Eastern Color's seminal series Famous Funnies #166 (May 1948), and a two-page Boy Scouts story, his first comics narrative, in New Heroic Comics #51 (Nov. 1948). (Williamson is also identified as co-penciler, with Frank Frazetta, of a three-page crime story, "The Last Three Dimes", in Standard Comics' Wonder Comics #20 [Oct. 1948].) Williamson explained that while Hogarth had offered him Tarzan work, Williamson "just couldn't do it. ... I couldn't get it into my little brain that he wanted me to do it exactly the way that he did it," and instead successfully recommended