other cartoonists was considerable during his lifetime and did not diminish after his death. Biography Early life and career Raymond was born in 1909 in New Rochelle, New York; his parents were Beatrice W. (née Crossley) and Alexander Gillespie Raymond, Sr. The boy was raised in the Roman Catholic faith. His father was a civil engineer and road builder who encouraged his son's love of drawing from an early age, even "covering one wall of his office in the Woolworth Building" with his young son's artwork. Raymond's father died when he was 12, after which he felt that there was not as viable a future in art as he had hoped. He attended Iona Prep on an athletic scholarship. There, he played fullback on coach "Turk" Smith's 1926 football team. Raymond's first job was as an order clerk in Wall Street. In the wake of the 1929 economic crisis he enrolled in the Grand Central School of Art in New York City and began working as a solicitor for a mortgage broker. Approaching former neighbor Russ Westover, Raymond soon quit his job and by 1930 was assisting Westover on his Tillie the Toiler comic strip. As a result, Raymond was "introduced to King Features Syndicate", where he later became a staff artist, and for whom he would produce his greatest artwork. Raymond was influenced by a variety of strip cartoonists and magazine illustrators, including Matt Clark, Franklin Booth, and John La Gatta. From late 1931 to 1933, Raymond assisted Lyman Young on Tim Tyler's Luck, eventually becoming the ghost artist in "1932 and 1933 ... [on] both the daily strip and the Sunday page", turning it "into one of the most eye-catching strips of the time". Concurrently, Raymond assisted Chic Young on Blondie. In 1933, King Features assigned him to do the art for an espionage action-adventure strip, Secret Agent X-9, scripted by novelist Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond's illustrative approach to that strip made him King Features' leading talent. Flash Gordon, Jungle Jim and Secret Agent X-9 Towards the end of 1933, King Features asked him to create a Sunday page that could compete with Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, a popular science fiction adventure strip that had debuted in 1929 and already spawned the rival Brick Bradford in 1933. According to King Features, syndicate president Joe Connolly "gave Raymond an idea ... based on fantastic adventures similar to