Ric Estrada

Born in Cuba on February 26, 1928, Ric Estrada built a versatile career that extended well beyond comic books into political cartooning, advertising, storyboarding, and commercial illustration. He eventually became a notable presence at DC Comics, where catalog records show him active across roughly seven decades of publication history, credited as artist, inker, and writer on some 168 issues.

At DC, Estrada found his most concentrated work on martial-arts titles that were riding the kung-fu entertainment wave of the 1970s. His name appears most frequently on *Richard Dragon, Kung-Fu Fighter* and the related *Karate Kid* series, alongside contributions to *Wonder Woman* and the fantasy title *Amethyst*. His willingness to work across genres — superheroics, action, fantasy — reflected the broad commercial range he had cultivated through years in illustration and cartooning outside comics.

Estrada continued to receive publication credits into the 2000s, a testament to the durability of material he produced during his peak years. He passed away on May 1, 2009, in his early eighties. While he never achieved the household-name recognition of some DC contemporaries, his body of work across the Richard Dragon titles in particular represents a distinct chapter in the publisher's Bronze Age output, and his Cuban-American background made him a quietly pioneering figure in a field that was not especially diverse during his working years.