Richard Bache Ayers (/ɛərz/; April 28, 1924 – May 4, 2014) was an American comic book artist and cartoonist best known for his work as one of Jack Kirby's inkers during the late-1950s and 1960s period known as the Silver Age of Comics, including on some of the earliest issues of Marvel Comics' The Fantastic Four. He is the signature penciler of Marvel's World War II comic Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, drawing it for a 10-year run, and he co-created Magazine Enterprises' 1950s Western-horror character the Ghost Rider, a version of which he would draw for Marvel in the 1960s.

Ayers was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2007.

Richard Bache Ayers was born April 28, 1924, in Ossining, New York, the son of John Bache Ayers and Gladys Minnerly Ayers. He had a sister who was 10 years older. The siblings were in the 13th generation, he said, of the Ayers family that had settled in Newbury, Massachusetts in 1635. At 18, during World War II, he enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps, and was stationed in Florida, where after failing radar training he was sent for a month's art training at McTomb University and began working as an artist in the Air Corps' Operations division. He published his first comic strip, Radio Ray, in the military newspaper Radio Post in 1942.

Ayers broke into comics with unpublished work done for Western Publishing's Dell Comics imprint. "I approached them," Ayers said in a 1996 interview. "I had a story written and drawn. They wanted to wrap a book around it.... I got into it, but Dell decided to scrap the project. ... It was an adventure thing, boy and girl; the boy wanted to be a trumpet player. The girl kept feeding the jukebox and he'd played along to Harry James or whatever sort of thing. ... It didn't make it, but it got me started where I wanted to be in the business."

Following this, in 1947, Ayers studied under Burne Hogarth in the first class of Hogarth's new institution, New York City's Cartoonists and Illustrators School (renamed the School of Visual Arts in 1956). Joe Shuster, co-creator of Superman, would visit the class, and Ayers eventually ventured to his nearby studio. "Next thing I knew," Ayers said in the same interview, "I was penciling a bit here and there." In a 2005 interview, Ayers elaborated that, "Joe had me pencil some of his Funnyman stories after seeing my drawings at Hogarth's evening class" and "sent me to [editor] Vin Sullivan of Magazine Enterprises." There, Sullivan "let me try the Jimmy Durante [humor] strip. I submitted my work and got the job."

Ayers went on to pencil and ink Western stories in the late 1940s for Magazine Enterprises' A-1 Comics and Trail Colt, and for Prize Comics' Prize Comics Western. With writer Ray Krank, Ayers created the horror-themed Western character Ghost Rider in Tim Holt #11 (1949). The character appeared in stories through the run of Tim Holt, Red Mask, A-1 Comics, Bobby Benson's B-Bar-B Riders, and the 14-issue solo series The Ghost Rider (1950–1954), up through the introduction of the Comics Code. The character's genesis came, Ayers recalled in 2003, when Sullivan "describe[d] what he wanted in the Ghost Rider" and told Ayers to see the 1949 Disney animated feature The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, one segment of which adapted Washington Irving's story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", featuring the Headless Horseman. "[A]nd then he told me to play the Vaughn Monroe record "(Ghost) Riders in the Sky". And then he started talking about what he wanted the guy wearing."

After the trademark to the character's name and motif lapsed, Marvel Comics debuted its own near-identical, non-horror version of the character in Ghost Rider #1 (Feb. 1967), by writers Roy Thomas and Gary Friedrich and original Ghost Rider artist Ayers.

Ayers' hands appear onscreen as those of a cartoonist played by actor Don Briggs in "The Comic Strip Murders", a 1949 episode of the CBS television series Suspense.