Chit-Chat with Tom and Harvey and Roger

SUTTON: I had a little chit-chat with Harvey [Kurtzman], and [Roger] Price wanted to get some more beer. That's one of the most tragic neighborhoods in the world. In order to get some beer, you have to go around behind the block of luxury buildings that face Central Park West and what is that street? I don't know what that street is, but it's dangerous.

GROTH: What was this conversation with Harvey that you were referring to?

SUTTON: I'd done some drawings. I'd done some renderings, color renderings for [Little] Annie [Fanny]. He had a very nice way of telling me that I should stick to my inkpots.

GROTH: Hmm. On his request you did this?

SUTTON: Yeah.

GROTH: So you tried out and you failed.

SUTTON: Well, me and 500 other people I guess.

GROTH: Right. Right.

SUTTON: As it turned out, it wasn't something that an artist would really be delighted in doing. If you weren't Bill Elder, you wouldn't have had fun doing this. But he was very nice. That was the thing with him. Here was a guy who was doing all these goddamn things, and he was helping people. He would send me little cards. Hello out there! So you wouldn't get discouraged. All of this stuff, taking care of his unfortunate child who was living in the house with them and all of that. It was very hard to dislike Harvey. It would probably take a couple of days. So we go get some beer. We were going around the corner to get some beer. I don't know what I was supposed to be doing. Maybe Price thought that I was more menacing or something. There were terrible people living there, and all of them are on the stoops.

GROTH: Right.

SUTTON: Sharpening their knives.

GROTH: Right.

SUTTON: You can accept that if you want to. On the way back from the beer store, he said, "This thing can be a great thing for Harvey." We were talking about Harvey in general. He said this could be a great thing. Also we were talking about some drawings that I'd done for him for his magazine.

GROTH: For whose? Price's?

SUTTON: I don't know what it was called. Maybe it was Aardvark.

GROTH: Aardvark magazine?

SUTTON: I'm trying to think of what the hell Price's magazine was. Which wasn't really Price's magazine, it was Price's and Harvey's, but Harvey didn't want his name on it.

GROTH: Huh. I don't recall this.

SUTTON: I don't either. Never mind. I told you, this was a long time ago. You know, he says, "You're good. This is fun stuff we're talking about. Stick with this. Make a buck, for Christ's sake!" And I said, "I love these comics." And he said, "Yeah. So does he. But it hasn't done a goddamn thing for him."

GROTH: For Harvey?

SUTTON: Yeah. And it's not going to do anything for you, either. I think Mr. Price was being very straight with me.

GROTH: But he was also encouraging you to pursue it, right?

SUTTON: In the sense of doing some of these pen-and-ink drawings for his humor magazine, which I did. He paid me, and that's the last I ever saw of him because he went out of business. He was a wheeler-dealer. He was a New York person. He's doing this, sort of as a sideline because he had his TV show to write. And all of this crap.

GROTH: Right. Was he trying to dissuade you from doing comics?

SUTTON: Yes. He thought comics, for the people who actually, physically produce them, was the biggest rip-off in the world.

Out with the Old

SUTTON: I moved to this place from the house that we could no longer afford. There used to be people who would come to that house, the young people. They would have these binders or they would have these other very expensive special thing in which they would have these comic books mylarized in. I would look at them and, "Oh, my God. Hold it. Get it sweaty. Read it. Figure it out. Take it apart. You don't preserve it." I remember when they first ran into the idea that if you saved these things as meticulously as they did, you could, in a hundred years, get a million dollars for them or something. I would come up with my old story of piling them all up on the sidewalk.

GROTH: Of doing what?

SUTTON: Piling them all up on the sidewalk.

GROTH: You did?

SUTTON: Yes. When I was finished with them. Yep.

GROTH: Why would you do that?

SUTTON: Gary, there were thousands and thousands of them. They were old.

GROTH: You just got rid of them?

SUTTON: I was done with them, that's why. It was all over with. I didn't have time to go around and find out who would really love to have this thing. I just... No. I still believe I was absolutely right.

GROTH: Yeah.

SUTTON: When you're done with something, that's it. It's over with. Forget it. You don't forget how to do it - not by this time - but you don't need all of these things. They're getting in the way. The thing was getting way out of hand. It wasn't only comic books. It was a lot of other stuff.

The Home Front

GROTH: The war would still have been going on.

SUTTON: Yep. I remember the boy next door coming back, George. He was so skinny and so tired. And so young. He was a B-17 navigator. I remember asking my father, what's he so tired for? My father would say, because he was tired. He was a little over the edge to be called up, right? So he went to General Electric and built gun directors. That was another trade of his. He was a machinist and he was a gunsmith. [My father] Harry was one of these people that if one job failed you turned to another one. You didn't go down and line up at the welfare office. That's an unfair thing to say, because a lot of guys don't have a choice, but Harry made sure that he had these various things that he could do.

GROTH: Did he pride himself on being self-reliant?

SUTTON: Absolutely. [Ruefully] And he didn't pride you if you weren't.

GROTH: What was his ethnic background?

SUTTON: He was a WASP. I got the whole work ethic and, more important, I got the work ethic that it's good to work with your hands. Look at this. I made this with my hands. You see, that kind of stuff sticks with you. Harry would not be happy with Apple Macintoshes.

GROTH: The whole managerial class might have been anathema to him. The organization man.

SUTTON: Oh yeah. I think he almost got into physical violence at General Electric. They wanted him to join a union. Harry said, "What do I need a union for? Why are you always thinking of yourself? Go away. Leave me alone." Because he knew perfectly well that nothing was going to happen to him. He was excellent at what he did. But he still had that feeling that he should have done his bit or whatever. God knows.

GROTH: You mean in World War II?

SUTTON: But actually, he was doing his bit. He was much more valuable at what he was doing than going out there and getting a hole in his head.

GROTH: So he didn't have a lot of solidarity with the working class?

SUTTON: No.

GROTH: What about your mother? What was she like?

SUTTON: My mother, God bless her. Well, my father died when he was like 50-some years old. He had the diabetic gene, which I have. He wouldn't take his shots and he'd eat giant pies.

GROTH: Like you?

SUTTON: Yeah. Momma died about six years ago, which is more or less - I was going to say OK. That doesn't sound right. She didn't know she was dying, anyway. She was one of the most anxious people I've ever met in my life and I inherited a great deal of that.

GROTH: By anxious you mean nervous?

SUTTON: Yeah. Like you take Diazepam. Got it? Or the hand is going to go right off the paper.

GROTH: It sounds like in that family she had a good cause to be anxious.

SUTTON: She was the youngest. She also worked in those goddamn cotton mills and shit like that. She had a room in my uncle's big house. He had one of those joints with the inside roofs. She had a room and my father would come there to visit and that's where he met her.

GROTH: So your mother worked as well?

SUTTON: Before she got married.

GROTH: But not after?

SUTTON: No.

Selling Smut in the Schoolyard

SUTTON: People gave me Joe Palooka comic books. I hated that.

GROTH: What was particularly hateful about Joe Palooka comics?

SUTTON: It was all stupid! Who cared! Look Tommy, there goes Humphrey on his Humphrey mobile. Neato. Can I have my EC comic book back now? I'm going to check out Woody's girls. I was spoiled I guess. People gave them to me, and I stole them, and I took them, and all of the time I was going to the schoolyard of the Holton Public School and I've come full circle.

GROTH: You're going to the schoolyard now?

SUTTON: I was making a living on the schoolyard drawing smut.

GROTH: You were drawing smut at the schoolyard!

SUTTON: Yeah. Or I would do them at home and bring them with me.

GROTH: When was this?

SUTTON: When I was going to the 7th, 8th grade or whatever you call it. That meant I had my milk money and the other crap you got for going to school. That was all for buying more comics.

GROTH: Have you ever read Spain's stories about when he was a teen-ager growing up in Rochester in the '50s?

SUTTON: No. But I admire him.

GROTH: I'll have to send you a collection of those. We did that.

SUTTON: I remember these fellows because everybody said, "Oh, no. Don't go near these guys. They're just a bunch of goons." Even my father was like that. He was probably afraid for me more than anything. But these fellows were not goons. They were not stupid. They didn't like stupid people. They were never going to be citizen of the week. They did not steal, as far as I know. They never did when I was around. They just didn't see why you had to dress up in the, how shall we say, at that time the school uniform. And they wouldn't.

GROTH: What kind of a teenager were you? Were you rebellious? Were you...?

SUTTON: A loner. I was a loner. I wanna be your friend. I don't need any friends. Boy was I wrong. That was me. That was the way I was. Wanna buy some dirty pictures? You don't? Get away from me. I had a Studebaker.

GROTH: [Impressed.] Yeah.

SUTTON: You know, the one with the bullet nose?

GROTH: Yeah.

SUTTON: Yeah. My friend Fab Tussle had a Hudson with the fold-back seats. Oh yeah, we were champs. We were champs.

Stars and Stripes

SUTTON: Sure. That was my school.

GROTH: What branch of the service were you in?

SUTTON: Air Force.

GROTH: You were learning how to assemble B-52's as I recall.

SUTTON: They send you to these - I don't even remember what the hell they call them any more - but there are hundreds of rooms full of books. They have every single goddamn nut and bolt that goes into these things and you're supposed to know what they all are. Obviously I was the wrong person to be there. I didn't even care.

GROTH: Well, you're detail oriented, though.

SUTTON: From there we went to California where I was on the flight line dragging airplanes around with trucks and scary things like that. Everybody thinks in the service that people get dead because an enemy bad guy shot you. I think more people get dead just because of the way they run the fucking thing. One fellow who comes to mind is a fellow who never should have been in the service at all. I'll make this very quick. I liked him. He walked behind where the fighters were revving up, and he got caught in that jet blast. There wasn't much left of poor Mr. Price.

GROTH: I assume that the accident rate in the armed services is probably pretty high.

SUTTON: Oh, it is. I mean, think of what you're dealing with. Monstrous things. Goodness gracious. Good thing Tom stayed inside next to the drawing board whenever possible. I finally was such a fuck-up, [they said] send him to Korea and kill him. Except there is no war in Korea. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

GROTH: You worked on Stars and Stripes, and you did a strip for them.

SUTTON: I did this comic strip for two years and some odd months. I did it seven days a week I think. It was all stupid. It was a kind of cheap version of Johnny Hazard, I think it was.

GROTH: That Frank Robbins did?

SUTTON: Yeah. Wasn't he great, though?

GROTH: Yeah. He was very good.

SUTTON: That's what we did. We did this for over two years.

GROTH: Was [Labarr] there at the time?

SUTTON: Every single day. See, for some fellows, when they come to a certain point in their life and they're not getting any younger, and you can't get a job, that kind of an outfit isn't too bad, apparently. I don't know. That's what he said he was doing there. That was the other problem. You couldn't talk to any of these people I discovered. It took me a while to get this down. None of these people were really straight.

GROTH: How do you mean?

SUTTON: Well, how did you get here? You don't ask that question. Can I see what you're writing? No!

GROTH: So they were not forthcoming.

SUTTON: Not only were they were not forthcoming, but they were armed, and they weren't supposed to be. I don't believe to this day that they were really editors or that they were really feature writers.

GROTH: You're suggesting something a little more nefarious?

SUTTON: Yeah. I shouldn't bother you with this. Just forget about this. It was very, very... When you got out of there it was an OK thing because nothing happened to you and you had a pretty good time and God bless America.

GROTH: But you were aware at the time that there were these currents in the office?

SUTTON: Yeah.

Wearing Three-Piece Suits

SUTTON: I worked at A.V.P. for a while, and I tried out two or three strips, film strips, that they had. Do you remember those little devices that they used to take a strip of film and show one frame at a time? They had a sound thing that went with them. Salesmen carried those around, plunked them on your desk, and impressed you about their gear shaft or something. I think my approach is that you can do all of this. They were using realistic characters not very well drawn. I said, Let me try one using cartoon characters. They're very much more vibrant, they catch the eye, and that guy won't fall asleep before the presentation's over. It worked. I became art director. I was a big shot, Gary. Boy oh boy. I had a three-piece suit. Boy oh boy. Went to the art director's club and got snorked.

GROTH: Did you actually wear a three-piece suit?

SUTTON: Absolutely

GROTH: Wow. This must have been...

SUTTON: Or a jacket and a vest and ... Because it's a game. It's like the service. You've got to fit in.

GROTH: How did you feel about that? Did you enjoy playing the game or did you resent it?

SUTTON: At first, I thought it was more fun than anything.

GROTH: Because you were playing a role?

SUTTON: Yes. And they didn't know it.

GROTH:. You were putting one over on them.

SUTTON: Yeah.

The Underground Scene

SUTTON: When I was fucking around in San Francisco, I wasn't trying to get anything done. I was just there to screw around. This is not a put-down to this neighborhood. Boston has neighborhoods like that, too. One thing was very irritating to me, and that was the super-cool attitude. What is this bullshit? Because to me, that's what it is. Do you want to develop your own secret code on your Captain Midnight decoder badge? You know, cool man! Everybody I talked to went man. A lot can happen to you, I think, when you are in a different environment and it doesn't go away right away.

GROTH: There were a lot of artists around that time who were struggling to do non-mainstream work, people like Kim Deitch and Vaughn Bode and Spain, but you just didn't find that whole milieu palatable?

SUTTON: I never gave it a chance. It probably was fun, again, if you had time for fun. I didn't have any time for fun. People used to tell me a stupid story, Oh, Mr. Crumb is afraid to come downstairs.

GROTH: In what context would that be?

SUTTON: Oh, he was in the next building or something. Allegedly there was somebody who he would throw his artwork down to or something and take it where it was supposed to go. And I'm working on my fucking horse or something... Oh, Gary, it was nuts. I'm afraid so much of it was me. So much of it was me. I know it was me. It wasn't the folks, it was me. I was desperate, I was working like hell, and I didn't have time for nonsense. You know? I don't think I knew who Crumb was. I'm sure I didn't.

GROTH: But you kept hearing the name.

SUTTON: Of course you did. Of course you did. And this one was compared with Crumb's work, and this one was compared with somebody else I'd never heard of. And that's fine. There was a lot of talk, Gary. There was a lot of talk about comics, there was talk about the magazines, talk about publications, but I didn't see anything getting done. You with me? Wrong place for me. It was like some kind of a tourist resort. That's cool, but damn it, I can remember being that angry. I wanted to fight with somebody. About what? Am I gonna change their view? No. Thank god I'd done the service time, and I learned that you don't change people's view that way.

On Richard Corben

SUTTON: Another fellow who was coming in about that time, a guy who became quite famous although I haven't heard from him lately. Corben.

GROTH: Rich Corben.

SUTTON: Yeah. I like Corben's black-and-white work a helluva lot better than I like his color work.

GROTH: Hmm.

SUTTON: Yep. It's all right. It's just me. I said, "Who is this person? Here is a person who is not out there tracing photographs. He's dong marvelous atmospheric things." I think that's the trick to all of the Eerie, Creepy, Vampy books: the atmosphere. Take away the atmosphere and you have nothing. There's no room for that in a war book, a Western book, or something like that. But a weird, strange book absolutely has got to have atmosphere.

On Gil Kane

SUTTON: Do you remember he did a newspaper strip about some space people or something?

GROTH: Starhawks. Yeah.

SUTTON: I'm told that he finished that whole thing with a Pentel pen.

GROTH: Yes. I believe that's true.

SUTTON: I thought it was beautiful.

Art Methods on Planet of the Apes

SUTTON: There's an adhesive that you can remove easily. I would have a three- or four-mil mylar film that would go over the surface of this whole thing. Therefore you have no fucking light boxes to bother with, etc. This particular mylar film, had an etched surface. It would take any kind of marker or ink, or whatever you wanted. It could even be scratchboard if you wanted it to be.

GROTH: You put the mylar over the black-and-white drawing?

SUTTON: Yeah.

GROTH: And you put the tones on the mylar?

SUTTON: Yes. That's right. Yes.

GROTH: And Marvel would shoot the work twice? They would shoot the mylar, and then they would shoot the line work and combine the two?

SUTTON: No. I think their magical printing people shot the whole thing at one time. And what happens... That was five mils. That was a very thick mylar. What happens, of course, when they shot it, is that they got a double line.

GROTH: I was going to say. Wouldn't that have blunted or muddied the black-and-white linework underneath it.

SUTTON: There was nothing underneath it, but... Oh, finally when you're all done you peel this thing away, your pencil thing. And you put a flat sheet of white behind it. Cheap white cardboard or something. I hadn't counted on that. It was just... And it wasn't their fault, either, because no matter how you moved those lights you were going to get a double line someplace. Now I know not to do that.

On Working with Mike Ploog

GROTH: One of the stories, the credits read, "Art: Mike Ploog and Tom Sutton." How did that come about?

SUTTON: Mike Ploog. Funny guy. Never met the man. I had to call him. I used to call him at this laundry. You'd hear machines going and chains jingling and screaming old ladies and shit like that.

GROTH: I'm not sure if I understand. You called him at a laundromat?

SUTTON: It was a pay phone.

GROTH: A pay phone?

SUTTON: He didn't have a phone.

GROTH: That's a little odd, isn't it?

SUTTON: Somebody would yell for him and presently he'd come downstairs and we would have our little conversation.

GROTH: He lived over a laundromat?

SUTTON: Yeah.

GROTH: [Amused] How peculiar. Did he pencil and you ink, or how did that break down?

SUTTON: Oh, I don't know, Gary. Something happened. Ploog has two ways of working - or did have two ways of working. He could work and he'd come up with a kind of Will Eisner thing. He would be quite careful about how he did this. He was a good brush man. I am not. He had another way, which was a lot looser and I've got to get this thing in by Tuesday. I think he's in L.A., too. Why aren't you in L.A.?

GROTH: I was.

SUTTON: Oh, that's right. Your house fell down the hill.

GROTH: I escaped.

SUTTON: Anyway, I think he'd drawn most of the whole thing roughly, drawn some of it tightly, and inked about three pages and didn't want to do it any more. Or what the equivalent is: got a better deal. I said, Yeah, that's fine. Send it up. I had a lot of fun with it. I enjoyed it. It was not the way I would draw anything at all, but it was... It's always a kick for me to see how another man goes about the same task. Otherwise, how the hell would I ever learn anything. I think he must have had a lot of animation background.

GROTH: Yeah. I think he did.

On Everett Raymond Kinsler

GROTH: Had you studied painters?

SUTTON: Sure. Way back at the school of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. That's mainly what they got there. Boy, they got some hoppin' toads there, I tell ya. You have to get away from this tiny little rectangle, and get a big rectangle. I do not believe I'm the only person who does that. I think it was in your magazine, someone once remarking about how incredible it was to have lunch with Everett Raymond Kinsler. I'm not comparing myself to Mr. Kinsler. Just the fact that this man never stopped drawing. He'd draw on the tablecloth...

GROTH: You never knew Kintsler?

SUTTON: No.

GROTH: How did you know that he was such a prolific drawer?

SUTTON: At that time I was doing Westerns, when I first started out, I had a whole swipe file of comics. Some of them by Kirby, some of them by Joe Blow, some of them by Everett Raymond Kintsler. You flipped those pages and all of a sudden: Stun! What the hell is he doing here? He can really draw? Not only that, but he had an inking technique that goes back to the turn of the century. Beautiful. And the control that you have to have to do that.

GROTH: Very classically educated, it looked like. He reminded me of Crandall.

SUTTON: Yes. I see how you might say that, but Kinsler's finished work had such freedom to it. It was super world class. And you're sitting there thinking, What the hell is this guy doing in a fucking comic book? This is silly. Well, you come to find out, as you move along in time - and we don't have time for this. So many stories that... What is this guy doing in comic books? I don't know. And he was the highest paid portrait painter in the world.

The Rat

GROTH: How would you get an assignment like this? Who would call? Would they just call out of the blue and say, "Look, we have a new book? We can hook you up with a new writer, are you on board? Was it as simple as that"?

SUTTON: That's interesting that you mention that, because that was the beginning of musical editors. These fellows would be there for two weeks, and you'd never hear of them again. Why that is I don't know. That's why I don't... Certainly I remember people like Archie who was a lifelong pal.

GROTH: Archie was editor in chief for about a week and a half. They went through a succession of editors. Shooter took over at some point and he remained the editor in chief for about eight or nine years.

SUTTON: I can remember people being so... they had a real attitude with Shooter.

GROTH: He was not liked.

SUTTON: I couldn't figure it out, because of course, I wasn't there. I never had any problems with him at all. I wanted to reprint something someplace else one time. I remember writing him a little note and he was very nice about it. "Go ahead."

GROTH: What was that?

SUTTON: One of the ratty things. I did a couple of ratty things.

GROTH: Ratty things?

SUTTON: The Rat.

GROTH: The Rat. Was this a black and white?

SUTTON: Initially, no. It was a colored thing. There were a number of these little things, and I snuck that in there. I had help in inking it because I literally didn't have any time to ink the whole thing. It was six to nine pages. Later on, I tried that with Denis Kitchen, by the way. Maybe that's when I wrote that. But it seems that Denis Kitchen, when he was in operation, was much closer to this time than Mr. Shooter. Would he have been around at the same time as Shooter?

GROTH: He was publishing at the same time. Sure.

SUTTON: All right. That must have been it.

On Wally Wood

SUTTON: I read your Wally Wood thing. Of course, Wood has always been one of my favorite people. Too often, he would remark about the fact that this was voluntary confinement. Remember that remark or something like that? There were some young fellows who were hanging around, and he was telling them, "Remember. You're only here to keep me awake, or something like that. There would be too much of that, which says to me, this man is driving himself beyond what he knows. Which is not a good place.

GROTH: You're talking about a Wood piece that appeared in the Journal. I didn't write it but I think I know what you're talking about. Wood was especially embittered by the practices in the industry.

SUTTON: Oh, yes. I talk to Bill Pearson often, and on occasion I get a lot of that. But I don't blame him. On the other hand, it's hard to defend Woody.

GROTH: He was obviously pretty self-destructive as well. For any intelligent artist with even modest ambitions, the industry was a pretty dismal place to be.

SUTTON: I could never understand it. With his ability, why comic books? Is that all there was at that time? We both know he did things in advertising and he was quite successful at it.

GROTH: I get the feeling that he loved comics. He loved storytelling.

SUTTON: Yes. So did I. You had to love it in order to put in as much as he did.

GROTH: I think Wally Wood felt restrained and resentful of the companies that he had to work for. Of course, he started Witzend in the '60s in order to do what he wanted to do. He also self-published the Wizard King and a couple other things in the '70s. You must have been aware of these attempts to break out of the editorial shackles of these companies. I'm just wondering if you felt frustrated working for them and felt the same way that artists like Wood felt to some degree?

SUTTON: To do something really like Witzend, the way he wanted it to be, you had to be a business man.

GROTH: To some extent. Yeah.

SUTTON: Even to a small extent.

GROTH: I don't think Wally Wood was a good businessman, though.

SUTTON: I talked to Bill Pearson often. We talk about this very same thing. Yes, he wanted to do this. He was definitely going to do this. It isn't fair to compare anybody. Woody had so many things that were short-circuiting. For him to plan far enough ahead for something to work was very difficult. That's not meant as a put-down, because Woody was one of my great little gods at one point. Still is, I guess. I used to try to ink like he did. He used to try and ink like Eisner, but even then, it always came out like him! I don't know. I think it's terribly difficult to try and figure out why we do any of these things. Because they're not rational. It's like looking at a picture and you know there's something wrong with it. For days, you can't figure it out, and you did it.

GROTH: Well, sometimes the sweep of life just takes over your life and you're caught up in it. It's hard to think beyond your immediate circumstances.

SUTTON: Yes. I was always told, well-meaning, that poor boys don't go off and become artists. You gotta get that job and get that check.

GROTH: On the other hand, you were not of the generation of John Buscema, who really just fit into that mold. You were the next generation. There was a lot of independent activity going on around you.

SUTTON: Buscema came up in the Depression era.

GROTH: And started working in comics in the '50s. Maybe late '40s. Whereas you started working in the time when underground comics were appearing. There were signs of rebellion. Wally Wood being a good example, Gil Kane being a good example, even among mainstream cartoonists. I think you clearly have a love of drawing. I'm not sure Buscema has a love of drawing. I think for Buscema, or someone like Buscema, it's a means to an end. That end, of course, is earning money. In you, I see a genuine love of drawing and a love of cartoonin g - if you see the distinction I'm making.

SUTTON: Do you know Masareel?

GROTH: Sure. The woodcut artist.

SUTTON: A person sits and cuts either into wood or linoleum for nine million hours until they finally have a little book. That staggers me! It really does. In our own country, we have Lynd Ward. The collection I have is a very heavy Abrams book called Pictures Without Words. That man is staggering. I don't often turn to those books.

On Karen Berger

SUTTON: There's another one. The Princess of Vertigo.

GROTH: Karen Berger?

SUTTON: Yeah. Yeah. I remember when Karen first came to DC, I believe this is absolutely true. She was working under Joe Orlando on House of Mysteries. She'd call up often and say, "Hey, Tom, is it OK to do this, if I do this?" After a few of these little things, they were pleasant enough. They were fine. But you begin to get the idea, Where the hell did you come from? The balloon on the left can hook over and attach itself to the balloon on the right, just like Harvey [Kurtzman] showed us. It was stuff like that. Eventually I did some drawings because I was adamant about this thing. I was nuts. I did Swamp Thing.. I did eight or nine pages. I called her and [she said] Go ahead and do your version. This was the point when [Stephen]Bissette and his pal there had quit.

GROTH: Bissette and [John] Tottleben.

SUTTON: Yeah. I think so. Yeah. They had done some beautiful work on that book.

GROTH: Yes.

SUTTON: They had just about, they had their stomach full. I said I would draw this thing. I sent it in and I waited and I didn't hear anything. So I called. Karen? Well, she got it. "Elegant drawing style. Have a problem with Abby, Tom." Abby is the muck monster's girlfriend. Runs around the swamp barefoot with little tiny shorts on and a little halter bouncing on top.

GROTH: Uh-oh!

SUTTON: Yeah. Never manages to get dirty. Soiled. She started in with Abby. She went on about Abby. "Abby never bends over like that." I love that shot. "Abby cannot do this. Abby is showing cleavage." Oh, they do that sometimes. Well, maybe you don't, Karen. She had me up the wall. Five of those pages were the monster doing all kinds of, to Tom, very fascinating things. She didn't give a shit about the monster. This obviously was to be the Abby comic book. This is Apartment 3-G in the jungle someplace. I put it to her. Don't you care about the title character? I didn't get any answer. "I guess we'd better continue this some other time, Tom." That was her dismissal. Perhaps I handled it all wrong. I don't know.

GROTH: This was a trial issue you were doing?

SUTTON: Yeah. I had included almost 100 pages that I did of what I considered to be the same monster from Marvel.

GROTH: Man Thing?

SUTTON: Yes. In half-page Xeroxes. She wasn't interested in that at all. Nothing interested her at all except Abby. All right. You're the boss. That's the way you want it, you better get somebody to draw it that way.

GROTH: You did not get that assignment.

SUTTON: No. As it turns out I heard from a couple of people, You're damn lucky you didn't. It sounds like a personal vendetta against her, and it isn't really. It's just that anybody... You don't care about the character? What?

GROTH: Were you given a script to try out on?

SUTTON: No. No. No. No. Just a batch of drawings.

GROTH: Just a bunch of your own drawings.

SUTTON: Which I was paid for. That was fine. It was just the attitude. To this day, I do not understand. The only thing I can come up with is, my version of Abby was just too sexist for her.

GROTH: That's what it sounds like. Yes.

SUTTON: There certainly was nothing wrong with the muck monster.

GROTH: I would expect only the best muck monster from you.

SUTTON: But you can't get along just on muck monsters.

A Logical Progression

SUTTON: Have you seen my wonderful things in Factoid Press?

GROTH: No. I haven't.

SUTTON: Poor deprived person.

GROTH: This is recent work?

SUTTON: No. It's not recent. It's stuff over the last six years, I think. Factoid is those large, $15 books that DC sells. The Big Book of Bad People. I liked those things. They're not comics, because they don't have continuity. They're just little pictures. But they're very difficult to work with, Gary.

GROTH: Hmm. The Big Books. I thought they were comics.

SUTTON: Not to me. Comics are things that do logically progress from one panel to the next.

GROTH: For me, too.

SUTTON: These things, that doesn't necessarily happen. What I'd like to do with the Dementia thing is to hook it someplace along the line, because it does.

GROTH: It does tie in?

SUTTON: I think so.

GROTH: Well, of course.

SUTTON: I also think it's part of the lash-back. I think it's part of years of repression and part of all of that kind of stuff. You gotta do something. Most of it I enjoyed. Some of the things I've done I don't. Oh my God! I did that! Most of it I enjoy. It has lead to a few other things, which don't involve superheroes.

First and Lost

GROTH: So far the only one you remember working on at First was Grim Jack. What was working for First like? Did they go out of their way to treat you better than Marvel and DC because they were competing with Marvel and DC?

SUTTON: I think at first they did. Yes. They were in Evanston.

GROTH: Yes. Evanston, Il.

SUTTON: Yeah. I was fortunate enough to meet their then editor.

GROTH: Was that Rick Oliver?

SUTTON: No. I talked to him a couple of times. He was OK. But there was the on-the-floor editor.

GROTH: Rick Obadiah?

SUTTON: No. He was the other. He was another something. He counted numbers or something. Oh, man! This guy is doing somewhat the same thing that I'm doing for the girly books today.

GROTH: Not Alex Wald.

SUTTON: Yes. Yes. Alex Wald. Many, many conversations with Alex. I don't think Alex was happy there, but he was getting paid.

GROTH: I think technically he was the art director. [Sutton laughs] You might not have known that.

SUTTON: I didn't know these guys had an art director. All right.

GROTH: That was his title.

SUTTON: Alex was a great guy. We were going to do this incredibly ambitious thing. It was like 100 pages or something of Milton's Paradise Lost. When you start drawing it, it's a pretty exciting thing to draw. All of your angels don't have little wings that look like feathers. Some of these angels are very dangerous to screw with. Hold it! I'm an angel!

GROTH: That seems like it would be right up your alley.

SUTTON: Yeah. All the dark stuff in there, and there was the very sensitive thing in there where the two of our forebears are there saying, "Can we do this? No? Oh. Wanna do something kinky?" It was all her fault. You know that.

GROTH: So you actually did finish Paradise Lost?

SUTTON: No.

GROTH: What happened?

SUTTON: I have manufactured covers for you using some of the paper that still exists from that project. This is very expensive Strathmore triple weight.

GROTH: So you got something out of it. [Laughter]

GROTH: What would you have preferred at that point in the early to mid '80s to be doing, given the nature of the comics industry?

SUTTON: Oh, I didn't want anything to do with comics at all any more.

GROTH: Really?

SUTTON: No. I just wanted to sit up there and paint my pictures.

GROTH: But that couldn't afford you a living, I assume?

SUTTON: Hardly. No.

On Charlton

GROTH: I don't know if you remember this, but I did want to talk a little about the specific art you did. The title of this story in this Charlton comic called Ghostly Haunt is "The Weirdest Character I've Ever Known." Joe Gill wrote it and George Wildman was the editor.

SUTTON: George Wildman is the Popeye guy. Wild man.

GROTH: This is drawn by you, and it uses a very thin, spidery line which is a little uncharacteristic of you, and it looks like it was one of those instances where you were experimenting with a new style. Do you remember this?

SUTTON: No. That's so heartening, isn't it? Talking to a man who doesn't even remember what the hell he did.

GROTH: You did some covers for Charlton, and I have one really nice cover painting you did for Charleton, on Ghostly Tales. How did you come to do cover paintings for them?

SUTTON: Because I wanted to. That's an inadequate answer, I guess. I think that's why a lot of people bothered with them who could do otherwise. There was none of this bullshit that big companies had. If you wanted to do a cover, you didn't send a pencil rendering to be approved. You just did the cover.

GROTH: There were no bureaucratic obstacles.

SUTTON: No. I would get a call from George Wildman. "Tom, can you do eight pages of Comic X by Wednesday? "Sure, George. "Hey, great. Gotta go!" I liked that. Not deliberating over this and that ridiculous thing.

From The Horse's Mouth

SUTTON: Joyce Cary in The Horse's Mouth - Did you catch that one? [Laughing] "Numbers were invented by Arabs who hate art." I love that. I love the movie, I love the book.

Trimmed from The Comics Journal #230

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