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Val Mayerik (b. 1950) is an American comic-book and commercial artist, best known as co-creator of...

Val Mayerik (b. 1950) is an American comic-book and commercial artist, best known as co-creator of Marvel Comics' satiric character Howard the Duck. Val Mayerik was born on March 29, 1950 in Youngstown, Ohio. He majored in art and philosophy at Youngstown State University, which he attended from 1968 to 1972. In spring of his graduating year, he met and began working as an assistant to Ohio-based comic-book artist Dan Adkins, alongside fellow assistant P. Craig Russell. Through Adkins, who was primarily an inker for Marvel Comics, Mayerik broke into comics that summer as penciler, over Adkins layouts, of the eight-page story "Spell of the Dragon", starring author John Jakes' sword-and-sorcery hero Brak the Barbarian. Published in the horror-fantasy anthology Chamber of Chills # 2 (Jan. 1973), it appeared a month after his first published comics work, the full-length "The Monster of the Monoliths" in Marvel's Conan the Barbarian # 21, which Mayerik and Russell penciled over Barry Windsor-Smith layouts. Mayerik quickly found more assignments, penciling Marvel's adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man, over Adkins layouts, in Supernatural Thrillers # 2 (Feb. 1973); and doing his