People Who Died

One staple of the year-end roundup is a list of all the greats who died in the previous 12 months. We've had plenty of people to mourn this year -- start with Billy Wilder, Chuck Jones, Joe Strummer, and Waylon Jennings -- and some very honorable corpses have inevitably fallen through the cracks. The Baltimore City Paper has rectified that, at least partly, with the life stories of nine recently deceased figures whose names may be obscure, but whose works are definitely not. Among the departed: the woman who invented Barbie, the man who drew the Silver Surfer, and the man whose painting adorns the cover of Miles Davis' Bitches Brew.