Enter Legendary Cartoonist Joe Staton!
“There’s always a way to get the truth; it just takes a little creativity.” — Dick Tracy (Chester Gould)
Joe Staton decided he wanted to be a cartoonist at three years old when he began tracing Dick Tracy from the funny papers. He has been drawing comics professionally since he started working for Charlton Comics in 1971. There he drew romance, horror and licensed books and co-created E-Man and Michael Mauser with Nick Cuti. Though the bulk of his work has been for DC Comics, Joe also worked for at least 30 publishers and 100 different editors. He inked The Hulk and The Avengers for Marvel. For DC his many comics credits include Action Comics, Green Lantern, The Legion, various incarnations of Batman, and over 100 issues of Scooby Doo. He co-created two versions of The Huntress and several Green Lanterns. He designed the modern Guy Gardner who appears in the new Superman movie.
While working with First Comics in Chicago, Joe was both Art Director and artist. He drew another incarnation of E-Man and, for their Classics Illustrated line, A Christmas Carol. With his writer-wife Hilarie, he produced several medical comics, most for Boston Children’s Hospital. For 10 years, between 2011 and 2021, Joe and writer Mike Curtis were the regular team for the Dick Tracy newspaper strip. Dick Tracy received Harvey Awards in 2013, 2014 and 2015 for Best Syndicated Strip or Feature. He has also received the Eisner and Inkpot awards.
Joe also worked with novelist Jerome Charyn on the graphic novel, Family Man. He recently completed a comic with Paul Levitz for the New York City Board of Education, Sketches on the Sidewalk, which tells how the early comic book industry was created by young Jewish artists on the Lower East Side of New York City.
Recently, I had the great honour of talking with Joe on my radio program, “Between the Grooves” (Sundays, 8-10 pm ET on Radio Kingston, WKNY 1490 AM and 107.9 FM). Joe lives in Kingston, New York, just three houses away from mine so we’re neighbors. Joe’s what I call a rock star in the comics world, and we spent a very enjoyable hour discussing his life as the cartoonist and illustrator of the Dick Tracy newspaper strip and many others. At the same time we listened to music that Joe chose especially for his appearance on my show.
Joe says he’s officially semi-retired. For him, that means he isn’t on tight deadlines like he was for 55 years, drawing one cartoon after another. He is now able to pick and choose his projects, which after all those years he rightly deserves.
When I was a kid growing up, which was probably the case for millions of children and young people, newspapers meant only the comics pages. Joe reflected that those were the days when there were plenty of comics to read in the newspapers. I asked Joe if he thought the business of comics has changed because the newspaper business has shrunk over the years because fewer people are buying print newspapers.
“It’s hard to find people actually buying comics on paper these days,” says Joe. “They’re still being published and are still out there but there are quite a few that are now online. There’s some fun stuff people are trying with different formats. There’s still some nice work being done.””
Talk of new formats replacing old ones reminded me of a story about the filming of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” While they were making the film, Coppola’s wife was filming the film being made. At one point, Coppola was talking about the advent of the video camera and someone said that would cheapen the film business because the quality was inferior, among other things. But Coppola had a different, completely opposite response and suggested there would be a Mozart that would do something amazing someday with the new technology. Most importantly, the use of video cameras would democratize the art of filmmaking, making it more open to those outside Hollywood.
Personally, I tend to embrace new technology and Joe agreed except in the case of AI taking the place of actual artists. I agree with him about that. “If it’s creative people using newer technologies, I certainly have no problem with that,” says Joe.
This led to a discussion about the rise of AI and some of the troublesome aspects to it, especially when it is used to hijack original images, music, writing, etc., and to replicate individuals, for example in films. “It’s at the top of people’s minds,” says Joe. Cartoonists and illustrators are seeing their own creations turned back against them, slightly modelled and changed somewhat, but it’s clearly their stuff,” Joe says.
One of the big issues last year during the SAG/AFTRA strike was about AI and its encroachment into the film and writing world and how AI is used there. I didn’t realize how serious this issue was until I saw an interview with one American actor working in London. He had just finished a play and someone said to him, “I saw you in the new Batman movie.” He replied that he wasn’t in the new one and he had been in the one before it. It so happened that his full body image had been reconstituted to use as a specific character in the new film. Joe says this has also been done in the Star Wars films with the digital recreation of the late actor Peter Cushing (who died many years ago).
I have been in one of those full body scanning machines for a video game project, so I asked Joe what he thought about today’s video game animation. “It’s not too different from rotoscoping and the Fleischer work of tracing actual film back to the 1930s so it has a background this makes up for,” says Joe. “But, as usual, you wonder at what point does the creative input go away?”
Minnie the Moocher (1931) - Cab Calloway (from Betty Boop)
“I remember seeing the Cab Calloway Fleischer Betty Boop cartoons that were on TV, which were available cheap for the stations and a lot of it was the Big Band sound and, of course, Cab Calloway, who was tied into the Betty Boop cartoons,” says Joe. “The Fleischers recruited Cab to put his music into the cartoons. They had a deal where Cab took a lot less [money] than he would normally be paid because they were tied into the Paramount theatres. Cab was guaranteed a certain amount of bookings in the Paramount theatres if he took a lower amount up front. Everybody on the circuit saw Cab in the cartoons and then saw him live. That got him booked everywhere. He came out of this very well. And it matched Betty Boop so well.”
Joe is a celebrity at Comic Con events. “A lot of it is just work,” says Joe. “People come, give me money and I do drawings — whatever they want. I sign things, do interviews at shows. I keep an eye out for the cosplayers (people who engage in costume role play), who are there dressed as my characters or the characters I am associated with, such as Guy Gardner, who is one of the Green Lanterns I designed.”
“Sometimes we get people who have absolutely, perfectly covered that costume,” notes Joe. The best one that I ever saw was a young woman. I find lots of young women like to dress as Guy Gardner, who is a very tough character. There are a lot of Robins. I didn’t design Robin, but I did a lot of stories with Robin.”
“The character of the Huntress is one that I designed,” continues Joe. “In one line of the comics, she is the daughter of Batman and Catwoman, and she has a definite following. The character and a similar character that I’ve designed, a different version of the Huntress — those have been developed and followed a lot. She is seen as an emblem of female empowerment.”
“My wife Hilarie has a nice t-shirt that says Strong Female Character,” says Joe. “The Huntress is your ultimate strong female character.”
“I’ve had times when young women follow the Huntress — Helena Wayne, especially — as a strong female character to lead them to strengthen their character when they have to make a strong decision,” says Joe.
I asked Joe if this was not only in real life — not just in a fantasy world — but also instructional and beneficial? “Yes, in real life,” says Joe. “And this is not only the Huntress. At one time I was working on the Legion of Super-Heroes, which is a group of teenage superheroes in the future. A continuing storyline was a romance between The Karate Kid and Princess Projectra. There was a perfectly rational young man at a show with his mother and his wife. He told me that he had followed The Karate Kid’s romance to see how to deal with a woman.”
This brought to my mind what happened during the Covid pandemic and resulting breakdown of social relationships and how that affected a whole generation of young people. Imagine that it was your first year of high school and then having to stay home and wear a mask for two years. Imagine how difficult it was to meet other young people and date. There was less of a chance for young men, especially, to relate to another person (a female person, in particular) as a human being rather than an unmet need, or something like that. I can imagine the comics might have guided some young people morally on a certain level. What would your favourite superhero, for example, Batman do?
But maybe Batman wasn’t a good example of a superhero to emulate as I thought since Joe was quick to bring me up to date on how the Batman character has changed over the years. “Today, there are some versions of Batman these days that are not role models,” says Joe. My question was how did Batman go from a good guy to become a bad dude? “A generation came along that was older and that the hero versions they were seeing needed to be made adult and being more adult because a bit more brutal and rougher,” explains Joe.
Some people see art as a reflection of life. Others may see it as a reminder of what happened in the past or as a harbinger of the future. I see cartoons as an art form with a very long and illustrious history going back to the Middle Ages where drawings were made as templates for stained-glass windows, frescos and tapestries. Some centuries later, the Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya’s (1746-1828) produced a famous series of Tapestry Cartoons between 1775 and 1792. These cartoons were full-sized sketches — and in Goya’s case, oil on canvas paintings — served as guides for tapestry weavers. I think the connection and evolution of tapestry cartoons, the social and political cartoons of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the cartoons of the early 20th century up to the present day is the way they all communicate ideas and tell stories using simple visual elements.
“There wasn’t a time when I wasn’t aware when I wanted to draw cartoons,” says Joe. “There was an editor named Julius “Julie” Schwartz in the 50s. There were letter columns in the comics and people read them and would enter them and they would print your name. I realized there were people who were drawing this stuff. I began following specific people to see what they were doing. I thought if I pushed into it, I could do this, too. At an early age, I was thinking of this as possible employment but was figuring it out as I went along.”
Joe attended a college in Kentucky that had a good art program but it was primarily for fine arts. “They didn’t really take it seriously that anyone would want to make a living drawing comics,” says Joe. “I eventually went to New York. I knew people who were professional artists, such as Dan Adkins, who worked for Wally Wood. I worked for Gil Kane, who was the one who invented the original run of the Green Lantern that I followed.
“I had a bit of academic training but like anything else you figure out what you need to do when you’re actually out there doing it and working for somebody who wants you to get it done.” Wise words.
“King Kong (Theme)” – Max Steiner
Max Steiner also composed the music for “Gone with the Wind,” notes Joe. “He could capture the storytelling, all the feeling of King Kong and the jungle.”
Film music has developed so dramatically over the past 100 years from one person sitting in a corner playing an organ or piano while they showed the movie to a group of musicians or full orchestras playing the score while looking at the film. “Overdone music — which you need — is used to tell the story,” notes Joe.
Sheena’s a Punk Rocker (1977; 2017 remaster) – The Ramones – Rocket to Russia (40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition, 2017)
I asked why Joe chose “Sheena is a Punk Rocker” for his playlist. “It’s because Sheena is a comics character,” says Joe. “And for some reason, The Ramones decided that Sheena is really a punk rocker. That’s what this is all about. The Ramones had a connection to movies. They did “Rock and Roll High School;” that was great, too. They were actually in that. It struck me that “Sheena is a Punk Rocker” seemed to get the whole connection — the music, the storytelling and the whole thing.”
It seems to me that there is a punk element to the comics world, in a sense. It’s somewhat subversive and rebellious. I asked Joe if it is still that way.
“There are elements, but I think the big time of the underground comics is past,” says Joe. “But there are still some elements present. There was a documentary, “Disaster is My Muse” about Art Spiegelman (“Maus”) on PBS, which is very good even though it was censored. But it was his time — and the time of Robert Crumb (R. Crumb).”
“There’s still some good work being done,” says Joe. “But it’s a different time [now].”
When I was a kid growing up, I really liked Li’l Abner and Dick Tracy. Occasionally the cartoonist was changed, and the character would look slightly different. Joe invented characters but also followed in the footsteps of original cartoonists, such as Chester Gould who was the original Dick Tracy creator from 1931-1977.
“I always tried to pay attention to what Chester Gould originally was doing in his run because the characters were drawn very grotesquely and very ‘design-y’ but Dick Tracy inhabited a very dark world, the way buildings were done…,” says Joe.
I asked him about some of the features of Dick Tracy’s world. I can see some of the original images in my head, the way Dick Tracy’s jaw looked and his hat, for example.
“A lot of the silhouettes and shadows weren’t the way they actually fell on a human face but were designed elements on a face that would help tell a story without getting too lost [in the narrative],” says Joe. “It was like making a world with characters who belonged in that world. That’s what Chester Gould did.”
“And in the original Batman [series] that was very much the way that was, with artists like Dick Sprang,” says Joe.
This style and sensibility goes hand-in-hand with what was going with film noir and even portraiture, which was very stark black-and-white contrast, and shadows were part of the dialogue with the viewer.
“The way it usually worked was if someone died or got another job, another artist would take it over and there would be a transition period where the new artist would try to follow the older artist more closely and as you went along the new artist’s personality would start to emerge,” says Joe.
From “2001: A Space Odyssey” – Thus Spake Zarathustra – Richard Strauss – Performed by the University of Illinois Symphonic Band conducted by Dr. Harry Begian
I asked Joe where he thinks the future of comics lies as I meet a lot of young people with books full of drawings. Joe says there’s a comics shop in Kingston, New York that hosted a small convention locally where they were showing independent comics. “They are still putting pictures on paper so it’s not all online, so there are the zines, which are like small comics stapled together,” says Joe. “At shows, you see people selling their own zines.”
The French and Japanese are really into comics, I noted. The French really take their western comics very seriously. “The French were doing hardback comic albums long before the Americans did,” says Joe.
Check out Joe’s work at joestaton.com. It was a pleasure talking with him and sharing stories about comics — a great love of mine since I was a child — and his career. Here are the rest of the tracks that he suggested for his playlist that we didn’t have time to talk about during our time together.
Looney Toons Theme (1937) – Carl Stalling
St. James Infirmary (1943) – Cab Calloway
Theme from Superman (1978) – John Williams