Just a week after the death of the pioneering Filipino artist Tony DeZuniga (see "Tony DeZuniga, Co-Creator of Jonah Hex, Dies at 79"), Ernie Chan (born Ernesto Chua), who came to the U.S. from the Philippines in 1970, has died at the age of 71 after a yearlong battle with cancer.  Like DeZuniga Chan first found work with DC Comics including a two-year stint on Batman in the mid-1970s.  His compositional skills were so highly regarded that he was also DC’s primary cover artist in the mid-seventies. 

 

Chan became a U.S. citizen in 1976 and moved on to Marvel where he worked on a number of titles, most notably Conan the Barbarian.  Chan, who inked the pencils of John Buscema on Conan (and those of John’s brother Sal on The Incredible Hulk), readily absorbed the dynamic figure-drawing focus of the barbarian comics genre and quickly became a master of it, which he demonstrated both in embellishing the drawings of the Buscema brothers and in his own penciling stints on titles such as Kull the Destroyer, Savage Sword of Conan, and Power Man and Iron Fist.

 

Though he is most often associated with Conan, Chan worked on a lot of horror and supernatural comics at DC in the 1970s including House of Mystery, House of Secrets, The Unexpected, and Weird War Tales (from which this excellently composed series of panels was taken).

 

Chan shifted his focus to animation in the 1990s and retired in 2002.