Adaptations Ace Drummond (1936) | ||
Ace Drummond was an aviation comic strip scripted by Eddie Rickenbacker, the celebrated World War I aviator, and illustrated by Clayton Knight (1891–1969), well-known aviation author and artist, who was the father of illustrator Hilary Knight. In its five-year run, it followed aviator Ace Drummond on his adventures around the world.
Distributed by King Features Syndicate, the comic strip ran as a Sunday page from 1935 to 1940. According to Rickenbacker's autobiography, at its peak, the strip ran in 135 newspapers.
In 1936, the strip was adapted into a movie serial. Rickenbacker was a key factor in the promotion of this strip through the formation of Eddie Rickenbacker's Junior Pilots Club, displaying the Ace Drummond characters on buttons distributed to listeners.
Between 1935 and 1940, Knight and Rickenbacker also did another King Features comic strip, The Hall of Fame of the Air, depicting airplanes and air battles in a fact-based series about famous and little-known aviators. This strip was adapted into a Big Little Book, Hall of Fame of the Air (Whitman Publishing, 1936).