Chris Duffy's Blog

A "sketch" for a series about being squeamish and repressed. Or this might be the last one.

My friend, the painter Terence Donovan, invited me to teach a comics class with him at a local arts center. It's fun--mostly because Terence is a great, warm teacher who the kids love and trust. Then Duffy, the rigid dilettante, hands out "worksheets" and lectures on clarity. Luckily, the kids just draw funny comics and don't take my posturing too seriously. And in fact, they do like the worksheets, for the most part.

Here's some I handed out last week. Each kid blew through them in about 3 minutes!
(Click for bigger.)

Did I mention I'm available to edit comics on a freelance basis? That's right! See the list of some of my comics credits on the left; search the internet for nice things said about my professionalism and abilities; look at this picture of me intently reading something (that I didn't actually edit). It all adds up to one thing: this guy was born to be paid for editing comics. "This guy" is me, by the way.

I know blogs aren't always the place to do this kind of thing. Not very info- or enter-taining. But still, it's all true!

Some editor! I used the phrase "for a sec" or "for a second" three times. I'll be fixing that.

In 1990 I decided to be a cartoonist and I moved to New York. This was one of the first comics (well, more of a humor piece) that I did in my swank Brooklyn apartment with real live comics tools--crow quill, India ink, and bristol board. Turned out okay, if you like the doggie humor. It was never published anyplace but my sister in law liked it enough to hang a copy in her bathroom. That's the highest flattery as far as I'm concerned!



Please note, I did not draw the dog. It's from my trusty Webster's 9th New Collegiate Dictionary.



Click on the thumbnail below to see it big and readable.

I'm going to start updating my Power Glove "graphic" "novel" in black and white here and put the color (eventually) at my webcomics nation page.

For those few of you who don't know my Power Glove work (it's possible there are a few of you) the story starts here. Seriously, this will seem totally random at first, but I need to post frequently if I'm ever to finish!

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.

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!

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!