Gill Fox, a jack-of-all-trades cartoonist who collaborated with the first generation of comic-book creators on innovative characters including Plastic Man and the Spirit, died on May 15 in Redding Ridge, Conn., his daughter Donna Morency said. He was 88. As an editor, artist and writer at Quality Comics from 1940 to 1943, Mr. Fox drew covers for comic books featuring the diminutive Dollman and edited “Police Comics,” which featured Jack Cole’s Plastic Man. A skillful artist in his own right, Mr. Fox had a tight, clean-lined brush style. He also penciled and inked “Torchy,” a comic book created by the pin-up artist Bill Ward.
In a career that spanned eight decades, Mr. Fox drew backgrounds and wrote the scripts for episodes of the daily newspaper version of “The Spirit” by Will Eisner. He also helped with the strip “Hi and Lois.” He also wrote and drew the long-running single-picture newspaper cartoon “Side Glances” from 1962 to 1982. Examples of his line drawing and advertising illustration include the betoqued chef, winking and making an A-O.K., who was nearly ubiquitous on pizza boxes in the 1980’s.