Born July 9, 1921, in Stamford, Connecticut,[3] to a family that included brothers Joe and Leonard,[4] Tony DiPreta grew up during the Great Depression, during which his father had little or no work and his mother sewed in a sweat shop for $7 a week.
[citation needed] He decided while in junior high school that he would pursue an art career after reading in the local newspaper that cartoonist H. T. Webster made $50,000 a year.
After graduating, DiPreta and fellow future professionals Red Wexler and Bob Fujitani took classes at the Silvermine Guild, where the trio drew from live models.
[citation needed] DiPreta had worked for a local advertising agency while attending high school, and after a year doing that, he obtained a union job at McCalls Photo Engraving, also in Stamford.
Separately, DiPreta freelanced as a fill-in letterer for Lyman Young's newspaper comic strip Tim Tyler's Luck.
"[5] After seeing the portfolio samples that DiPreta brought to him during a lunch hour in 1940, Quality publisher Everett M. "Busy" Arnold hired DiPreta as a staff letterer for $25 per week, a wage equal to that of his now-working father's well-paying job as a defense industry worker.
[citation needed] Following that initial Timely story, DiPreta drew only sporadically for the company during the 1940s due to steady work from former Quality editor Cronin, who by then was at Hillman Periodicals.
DiPreta drew such Hillman humor features as "Buttons the Rabbit", "Captain Codfish", "Earl the Rich Rabbit", "Fatsy McPig", "One Wing Spin", "Skinny McGinty" (in Air Fighters Comics) and "Stupid Manny" (in Clue Comics).
[9] Afflicted by a heart murmur since age 13, DiPreta was rejected for World War II military service as 4F.
He also drew occasional stories for such Atlas crime fiction titles as Tales of Justice, war comics such as Battlefront, and, returning to humor, the sole two issues of the Casper the Friendly Ghost-like Adventures of Homer Ghost.
In 1959, DiPreta succeeded creator Ham Fisher and first successor artist Moe Leff on the long-running boxing strip Joe Palooka.
[4] He continued on that strip, written by Jim Lawrence, Bob Gustafson, Ken Fitch, Morris Weiss, and Ed Moore, through its end in 1984.
Comics' Fantastic Adventures #3 (Oct. 1987), for which he penciled and inked the cover, the four-page humor story "The Score Board Kid" (by writer Jerry DeFuccio), and "The Motor-Man On Wheels!