Joe Staton’s the new artist on the Dick Tracy comic strip. I wore a tattered “E-Man” T-shirt for decades in his honor. E-Man was part of a new breed of irreverent superheroes, and was all the more outstanding for being published by the Connecticut-based Charlton Comics. The bulk of Charlton’s output was highly derivative of the mightier comics publishers, so E-Man’s sense of self-parody really stood out.
I also dig Staton for being one of the artists who really understood the “new look” concept that Archie Comics experimented with in its digests over the past few years. This was an attempt to bring more realistic artwork and more contemporary teen-trauma situations to the Archie line. Unlike some of the other artists, who were too keen to transform the established characters, Staton realized that a middle ground was required between the Archie archetypes and these 21st century updates. His drawings were shadowy and detailed without losing their looseness, their crucial cartoonishness.
So I’m keen to see where Joe Staton (in league with writer Mike Curtis) takes Dick Tracy. Already the pace is faster, the tone lighter and the drawing style rounder than what the newly retired Dick Locher. Locher worked with the strip’s creator Chester Gould in the 1950, and has been its guiding force since the early ‘80s—even when he relinquished the drawing of Tracy to Jim Brozman a couple of years ago, Locher still steered the storylines, and Brozman aped Locher’s style in the artwork.
For me, Staton’s zipping the strip right back to the freshness it had just after Chester Gould retired, when the brilliant Max Allan Collins was writing it and Rick Fletcher was drawing its newfangled punk rock and second-generation flatter-top villains.