Jim Manley wrote to ask…
You commonly post your memories of some of the artistic folks you've had a chance to meet and work with. How about trying to get in more anecdotes and reminiscences while folks are still around to potentially chime in and enjoy the memories? One person I would like to hear more about is Joe Staton. I had a chance to meet him at a con this year, and he seems to be a lovely man as well as a great artist. I notice he contributed to Destroyer Duck back in the day. Do you have any experiences to share about Joe?
Joe Staton is a lovely man as well as a great artist. And lest Joe read this and get a swollen cranium, let me add that most people I've met working in comics have been lovely human beings and a pretty good percentage of them have been great artists. I've never made a list but I'll take a ballpark guess and say that 93.9% of those I've met — and I've met an awful lot of folks — have been good people. (A question I don't want to answer here so don't ask it is "How do you handle it when you like the person but don't like his or her work?")
Joe and I worked together on a short Blackhawk story and he gave me exactly what I wanted in every panel. A lot of people judge comic book artists by how cool individual panels or drawings are. I judge them more by how right they are: Did the artist draw the right thing or just the pretty thing? Joe always does both.
Joe was the penciler of a Superman-Bugs Bunny mini-series I wrote for DC and it was a rough assignment, juggling all those different characters who live in different worlds and putting them together into the same world. And adding to the difficulty was that the folks at Warner Animation can be really fussy about how Bugs and Daffy and all the rest are drawn. And to further add to it, we'd been told we could use one particular character in it and then once most of the series was drawn, someone found out there was a legal problem with including that character so finished pages had to be rewritten and redrawn…
…and oh, there were a lot of problems but not because of Joe. Joe did everything right. I don't know him as well as I'd like but I do know that I've never heard a bad word about him anywhere. And you can see for yourself how good he is at drawing just about anything.
