Alex Raymond (1909-1956) was born in New Rochelle, NY on October 2, 1909. Raymond had a solidly upper-middle-class upbringing, and though innately talented at drawing, he never entertained the notion of pursuing a career as a cartoonist or artist of any kind.  Instead, the well adjusted Raymond excelled in athletics and attended Iona on a scholarship. He then leveraged his degree to obtain an entry-level position on Wall Street.

The stock market crash of 1929 was the death knell of the Roaring Twenties, and the harbinger of the Great Depression. Like millions of others all over the world, it cost Raymond his livelihood.  It also scuttled his lifexs plan by denying him the career he hoped to pursue in finance. Raymond was forced to decide on an alternate path, and to do so quickly and with finality.

Perhaps he held in his hands in the days following Black Friday, but before he was formally dismissed, a stock certificate, and pondered his future. The paper itself had little intrinsic worth, but fired by imagination and hope and toil (human virtues all) its value could be hundreds or even thousands, requiring only that people perceive it so. But, of course, so too could perceptions be dragged down by all too human vices like complacency, and pessimism, and sloth, debasing the paper again. It might have seemed to Raymond a cynical application of human self-knowledge, and a cynical cause to seek to broaden it -- to speculate for profit on such things, a pursuit which could offer only the cold comfort of wealth, while taking away the ability to grasp lifexs wonder in its absence...