Rudolph Dirks, Harry Lucey for Eisner Hall of Fame

Rudolph Dirks and Harry Lucey will be the 2012 inductees into the Will Eisner Awards Hall of Fame.

The Eisner Award judges have selected pioneering newspaper cartoonist and The Katzenjammer Kids creator Dirks and artist and Archie co-creator Lucey for the honour.

A further four inductees will be voted in out of a list of 14.

Those nominees are Bill Blackbeard, Howard Chaykin, Richard Corben, Carlos Ezquerra, Lee Falk, Bob Fujitani, Jesse Marsh, Tarpé Mills, Mort Meskin, Dennis O'Neil, Dan O'Neill, Katsuhiro Otomo, Trina Robbins and Gilbert Shelton.

Dirks created The Katzenjammer Kids in the late 1800s for William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and worked on the strip until 1912. After a legal battle, he lost the rights to the strip's name but was allowed to write stories featuring the characters, which he did in his 50-year run on The Captain and the Kids in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World.

Dirks passed away in 1968. The Katzenjammer Kids continues to run in newspapers worldwide today.

Lucey, whose career began in the 1930s, was the primary artist on Archie from the '50s to the '70s. He died in 1984.

The Eisner Awards will be presented during San Diego's Comic-Con International on July 12-15.