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Bill Pearson (born July 27, 1938, in Belle Fourche, South Dakota) is an American novelist, publisher, editor, artist, comic book scripter and letterer, who is perhaps best known as the writer of Gold Key's Popeye comic book and the editor-publisher of his own graphic story publication, witzend.

In 1957, he was employed as a technical illustrator at the Ziff Davis publishing firm and began night classes at the School of Visual Arts, including an anatomy course taught by Burne Hogarth. Work as a technical illustrator for the Underwood Typewriter Company in 1959 was followed by two years as a mechanical draftsman at Motorola in Phoenix, Arizona.

While serving in the military at Fort Polk in Louisiana during the early 1960s, he met artist Ed Paschke. Working together in Fort Polk's Training Aids Department, they provided illustrations for publications, signs, targets and manuals to explain weapons and procedures to incoming troops. The two remained lifelong friends, and Paschke later was a contributor to Pearson's witzend.

During the mid to late 1960s, Pearson was an artist and production manager with the Manhattan art agency Admaster Prints, which had many national clients, including Citibank, the New York Life Insurance Company and Winchester Rifles. Income from Admaster and various freelance jobs made it possible for Pearson to underwrite his witzend (which had no national distributor and carried no advertising).

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Bill Pearson", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0