We have reports that long-time comic book artist Tom Sutton was found dead the other day in his home — "probably," one person theorized, "slumped over his drawing board." That was the man's usual habitat and, considering his output during certain times, it's doubtful he ever left it for long. Sutton was one of the few artists to get into comics in the late sixties, starting with westerns for Marvel and eventually moving into every other kind of book they had. His work was always competent and showed vast amounts of effort but it always struck me that he was perfectly suited for some kind of comic that no one was paying him to draw.
Lurking around the edges of his super-heroes and science-fiction tales was a wicked sense of humor, kind of what you see in old stories by Jack Davis (one of Sutton's heroes) before the world realized he was a humor artist. For a long time, Sutton drew ghost comics for Charlton where he obviously expended a lot more effort than their page rates warranted. He seized upon the freedom they offered in lieu of decent pay and produced work that was quite experimental and at times, obviously somewhat personal. When he did a job for DC or Marvel, as he did when he took on illustrating a new Star Trek comic for the former, he usually became a much more conventional artist…and therefore to his fans, not as interesting.
I never met the man in person but we corresponded briefly. What I recall from his letters was that he never stopped being a fan, never stopped wanting to learn how to be a better artist. In one note, he listed about twenty questions he hoped I could answer about Jack Kirby (another hero), all of which boiled down to, "How does he do that?" With one, he sent me a lovely print of a cover he did around '68 for Bill Spicer's Graphic Story Magazine. It was a huge, cluttered western barroom brawl that, I suspect, showed the kind of thing he could do when he was more interested in pleasing himself than in pleasing editors. It made you wish he could have made a living pleasing himself.