Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery #5, 1963
Ray Bailey grew up in a newspaper environment as the son of Ray W. Bailey, a reporter for a New York paper. He started out working for the Fleischer studios in Manhattan, cooperating on animated cartoons of 'Betty Boop' and 'Popeye'. At the same time he made illustrations for several journals. In the late 1930s Bailey was an assistant on Gus Edson's 'The Gumps' and later on Milton Caniff's comics 'Terry and the Pirates' and 'Male Call'.
Vesta West (1942)
In 1942 he started his first personal series, 'Vesta West' for a Chicago newspaper, which was followed by the aviation comic 'Bruce Gentry' for the New York Post Syndicate in 1945, which was also made into a movie serial in 1949. In 1951 he started 'Space Cadet Tom Corbett', a comic strip based on popular science-fiction TV and book series, which was written by Willy Ley and ran until 1953 through the Field Enterprises Syndicate.
Tom Corbett Space Cadet (11/5/1952)
Bailey was also the author of several 'Steve Canyon' comic books in Dell Publishing's Four Color collection, while additionally ghosting the daily comic in 1960. He also did art on a number of Dell TV show adaptations, including 'Boots & Saddles', 'The Gray Ghost' and 'Ripcord', as well as 'Turok, Son of Stone'. Other comic book work by Bailey are romance stories for Harvey Comics, some 1960 issues of King Publishers's 'Mandrake the Magician' and ghost and mystery comics for Charlton's 'Ghostly Haunts' and Western's 'Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery' and 'The Twilight Zone'. His final work in the comic book field was Tower Comics's 'Undersea Agent' in 1966-67. He was married to fashion illustrator Dorothy Behrens.
Undersea Agent (1966)