Early life and career Lloyd Jacquet was born in
Brooklyn to a father who had emigrated from France. After serving as a
colonel in
World War I, Jacquet worked as an
editor for Major
Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson's
National Allied Magazines (the future
DC Comics) on some of the first comic books — including the landmark
New Fun: The Big Comic Magazine (Feb. 1935), the first such publication with solely original material rather than any
newspaper comic strip reprints. Jacquet remained through its first four issues, and then art director of
Centaur Publications — where some sources credit him with co-creating writer-artist
Bill Everett's superhero
Amazing Man — before leaving to start Funnies, Inc. The company was founded as
First Funnies, Inc. in an attempt to publish a promotional giveaway comic,
Motion Picture Funnies Weekly, but that idea proved unsuccessful. Novelist
Mickey Spillane, who began his career in comics and worked at Funnies, Inc., recalled in 2006 that, "Our boss, Lloyd Jacquet, a dead ringer for
Douglas MacArthur (corncob pipe and all), was a wonderful man, but could never understand living among wildcat writers and artists. All of us were pretty much freelance people, so firing us would have been a useless gesture". As
Captain America co-creator
Joe Simon further described, "Jacquet's office was painted battleship gray. The furnishing were sparse, his desk ancient but scrubbed and neat. His black, high-topped shoes, polished to a high sheen, reflected a military presence as he sat upright in a straight-back chair...."
Later life and career After Funnies, Inc. ended,
Lloyd Jacquet Studios continued to package comics through at least 1949, when Jacquet hired artist
Joe Orlando to do work for
Treasure Chest, the
Catholic-oriented comic book distributed in
parochial schools. Other Lloyd Jacquet Studios projects included
Your United States, an educational, giveaway comic produced for publisher
Fred W. Danner in 1946, with art by
Sid Greene and
Tex Blaisdell. Jacquet was living in the borough of
Queens, New York when he died in March 1970 at c. age 71. == References ==