You gotta love killer teddy bears...and Tom Sutton

Because everything he drew was just dead on. I never read a Tom Sutton story where I wasn't really drawn to the art and storytelling. Sutton approached every story with a cartoonist's sensibilities combined with an illustrator's chops--always efficiently done but with enough weird detail (sometimes more than enough) to make you look twice at a lot of images. Sort of like Toth via Wrightson...or something like that. Sutton's art always made it look like he was having a blast.

For a Charton horror comic, this Sutton-drawn story has an unusually coherent and forward-moving plot. Who wrote it? The Grand Comics Database doesn't list the writer, but I'm going to guess Tom himself did the job, because it's so much less a mess than most Charlton stories...the dialog and captions have a cartoonist's economy (at least for 1971, when it was originally published). But I could totally be wrong.

Please note: Laura Galen=Awesome

Nickelodeon Magazine, where I have been lucky enough to be comics editor for 12 years, has been discontinued. I'm incredibly honored to have worked there. It was the job of my life--I got to work with a vast array of talented and funny people (staff and cartoonists) and the end result was always a magazine I was proud to have been a part of. An amazing opportunity--one that frankly still dazzles me.

I owe it all to--and kids everywhere should thank--Laura Galen, who started and ran the magazine (as editor-in-chief and then as Editorial Director) for all 16 years, hired the staff, and always, always pushed for excellence. Take a bow, Laura! We love you and we loved Nick Mag!

King Aroo is coming!

I haven't heard anything in the way of release dates yet, but Dean Mullaney at IDW is putting together a complete collection of Jack Kent's great comic King Aroo. I really don't have a lot to say except that Kent's work is really charming and it WORKS so well. Completely unpretentious but very smart.

Here's a Sunday from the mid 50s:



And here's a daily I was lucky to get off of ebay (scanned in color so you can see Kent's blue line work):



King Aroo lasted from 1950 through the mid 60's--a pretty long run by today's standards, but when talked about historically it's always considered a strip that got cut off in its youth. Only one reprint book ever came out during its run--covering much, but not all, of the first year. Rick Marschall's NEMO reprinted a fantastic surreal run of dailies in the 80s, and Tom Devlin edited a collection of Sunday's for an oversize Comics Journal special a few years ago (using Sundays from my collection, I'm collector-proud to add.) But all that adds up to a small fraction of the run of the strip.

I haven't used this spottily updated blog to plug anything until now, but if you like good cartooning, you should really check out this reprint series when it comes out!