Dille, John Flint

Dille, John Flint (1884–1957) newspaper syndicate executive; born in Dixon, Ill. The son of an educator, he attended the University of Chicago before founding the National Newspaper Syndicate (1917), which distributed the work of prominent journalists at low cost to newspapers. Credited with originating the "Buck Rogers" comic strip—he saw the possibilities in a novel, Armageddon 2419 A.D., by Philip Nowlan and commissioned Richard Calkins to draw the strip—he introduced the long-running science fiction adventure in 1929. At its peak of popularity, 287 newspapers in 40 countries carried the feature.