 Raymond 's father encouraged his love of drawing from an early age , leading him to become an assistant illustrator in the early 1930s on strips such as Tillie the Toiler and Tim Tyler 's Luck . Towards the end of 1933 , Raymond created the epic Flash Gordon science @-@ fiction comic strip to compete with the popular Buck Rogers comic strip and , before long , Flash was the more popular strip of the two . Raymond also worked on the jungle adventure saga Jungle Jim and spy adventure Secret Agent X @-@ 9 concurrently with Flash , though his increasing workload caused him to leave Secret Agent X @-@ 9 to another artist by 1935 . He left the strips in 1944 to join the Marines , saw combat in the Pacific Ocean theater in 1945 and was demobilized in 1946 . Upon his return from serving during World War II , Raymond created and illustrated the much @-@ heralded Rip Kirby , a private detective comic strip . In 1956 , Raymond was killed in a car crash at the age of 46 ; he was survived by his wife and five children . 
