Michael "Mike" Esposito (July 14, 1927 – October 24, 2010), who sometimes used the pseudonyms Mickey Demeo, Mickey Dee, Michael Dee, and Joe Gaudioso, was an American comic book artist whose work for DC Comics, Marvel Comics and others spanned the 1950s to the 2000s. As a comic book inker teamed with his childhood friend Ross Andru, he drew for such major titles as The Amazing Spider-Man and Wonder Woman. An Andru-Esposito drawing of Wonder Woman appears on a 2006 U.S. stamp.
Esposito was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2007.
Mike Esposito was born in New York City, New York, with a musician father who in 1928 fronted the band Ralph Perry and His Orchestra, and later was a grocer. Esposito graduated from The High School of Music & Art, then in Harlem, where one of his classmates and friends was future comics artist Ross Andru, with whom he would collaborate on flip-book animation. One early artistic influence was Milt Caniff's Terry and the Pirates, while another was Lev Gleason Publications crime comics artist George Tuska, of whom he said,
For some reason, I was attracted to that stuff more than the superheroes, as a kid ... and I love the way he drew those characters. They were like a caricature of the real gangsters. ... I loved the faces of his — their teeth and the kind of garb they would wear, their clothing. As a young fella, 14 years old, I tried to draw like him. ... I used to always want to emulate his look. Part of it had to do with the fact that he didn't overwork [his drawings]. It was simplistic, the backgrounds and so on. The character was the whole thing. The facial expressions. ...
Originally Esposito dreamed of becoming an animator at Disney. This ended when his father did not want him to leave New York for the West Coast. Drafted into the U.S. Army on September 15, 1945, before finishing high school, he served at Camp Dix and Camp Crowder until it was discovered he could draw; Esposito was then dispatched to Germany, where he did venereal disease prevention posters, including the well-known "If you're drippin', you ain't shippin'" and "VD or not VD, that is the question." He was discharged from the Army "in about '47." That year he and Andru both enrolled in Burne Hogarth's Cartoonists and Illustrators School, later renamed the School of Visual Arts. Esposito's first published work in the comic-book field was for Victor Fox's Fox Feature Syndicate, where he worked as penciler, inker, and sometimes letterer.
Andru assisted Hogarth on the Tarzan newspaper comic strip from 1948 until, Esposito recalled, "the strip died in about 1950-51. Then Ross came to me when I started publishing and we more or less teamed up." Another source says penciler Andru first teamed with inker Esposito in 1949 for the publisher Fiction House, but this is unconfirmed at the Grand Comics Database. The team's first confirmed collaboration was on the six-page "Wylie's Wild Horses" in Hillman Periodicals' Western Fighters vol. 2, #12 (Nov. 1950), signaling the start of a four-decade collaboration.
In 1949, Esposito was working on staff at Lev Gleason. "I was there for a while and then I shopped around. Went to school first, naturally, and then went up to Timely Comics [the future Marvel Comics, as it was transitioning into its 1950s iteration, Atlas Comics]. ... Stan Lee interviewed me and said, 'Okay, you can start here as a penciler.' So my job was to pencil so many pages a week for my salary." His first confirmed work there is as penciler and inker of the war comics story "Heat of Battle" in Men's Adventures #6 (Feb. 1951), though he had done much uncredited work in the interim, including his first professional inking. He recalled,
I didn't do any inking until I was with Timely Comics and I met a girl up there who was in charge of the inking department. I was at a bar in the Empire State Building with Mike Sekowsky, and I said to her, "Gee, I'd like to get some inking done".... I didn't know then, but she was in charge of all the inking, so she gave me some pages of a story by Ed Winiarski. He did all teenage stuff like Millie the Model. I took one home, and I did it. I was getting $15 or $17 a page and that was pretty good on the inking. Pencillers were only getting $2 to $3 a page more and at that time there was a lot more work than pencil. Stan Lee found [out] about it. He called me and said, "Who gave you this stuff? You're a penciller, you do a page per day and if you want to do freelance pencilling at home on the weekends then you can take a pencil story home." I said, "Well, no. I just wanted to try it"; the whole idea of inking was something new. He said, "Well, it's a damn good job".... Maybe it wasn't that good at all but he made me feel comfortable with what I did. The end result was that I wanted to do more of the inking but I never got an opportunity. I stayed there for quite a while and I worked on Lev Gleason's Crime and Punishment magazine.
Let go from Atlas Comics after a short time, he and Andru became longtime collaborators, working together on various projects over a span of four decades.
They quickly founded their own comics-book company, the name of which is variously rendered as MR Publications, after the initial of their first names; Mr. Publications, after the company's sole series, the whimsical adventure comic Mister Universe, which ran five issues (July 1951 - April 1952); or the hybrid MR. Publications. The two also co-founded Mikeross Publications in 1953, which through 1954 produced one issue each of the 3D romance comics 3-D Love and 3-D Romance, two issues of the romance comic Heart and Soul, and three issues of the satiric humor comic Get Lost.
By this time, after having teamed for early work on Key Publications' Mister Mystery in 1951 and Standard Comics' The Unseen and Joe Yank (the latter credited as "Mikeross"), the two began a long career as one of DC Comics' primary war story artists, alongside the likes of Joe Kubert, Russ Heath, and Jerry Grandenetti, beginning with a story each in All-American Men of War #6, Our Army at War #14, and Star Spangled War Stories #13 (all Sept. 1953). For those titles as well as G.I. Combat and Our Fighting Forces, Andru and Esposito drew hundreds of tales of combat under editor and frequent writer Robert Kanigher.
From 1957 to 1959, Andru and Esposito shared a studio with fellow comics artists Jack Abel, Art Peddy and Bernie Sachslate, generally credited as Bernie Sachs. With Kanigher, the Andru-Esposito team introduced the non-superpowered adventurers the Suicide Squad in The Brave and the Bold #25 (Sept. 1959). The duo also drew early issues of Rip Hunter, Time Master in 1961.
After DC Comics in 1956 ushered in the period fans and historians call the Silver Age of Comic Books, by reimagining such Golden Age superheroes as the Flash and Green Lantern for modern audiences, Andru and Esposito began a long run on DC's Wonder Woman. They drew the long-running superheroine's title from issues #98–171 (May 1958 – August 1967), "defining her look during [this] boom period". As well, with writer-editor Robert Kanigher, they co-created the robot superheroes the Metal Men in Showcase #37 (April 1962), going on to draw the first 29 issues of the lighthearted series Metal Men, from 1963 to 1968. Esposito considered the series "the best idea [Kanigher] had done," specifying that, "Bob left the character design up to Ross and myself, under his supervision, of course."
Esposito gradually began freelancing for Marvel Comics, starting with his uncredited inking of industry giant Jack Kirby's cover of Fantastic Four Annual #3 (1965). For his inking of Bob Powell in the "Human Torch and the Thing" feature in Strange Tales #132, and his inking of Don Heck's "Iron Man" in Tales of Suspense #65 (both May 1965), he took the pen name Mickey Demeo (occasionally given as Mickey Dee or Michael Dee) to conceal his Marvel work from his primary employer, DC. He also occasionally worked under the pseudonym Joe Gaudioso for the same reason. The pseudonym Mickey Demeo, he explained, "was a name I had in the 1950s when I was doing horror [comics] stories" — considered disreputable at the time — "and I didn't want certain guys in the business to know who I was us. Mickey Demo was a relative's name up in Boston."