Match to Flame 229

It was at the Akron Comicon that fall that I approached Joe Staton about doing the first cover, and I couldn’t have made a better call. Joe was best known for his decades of work on DC Comics, where he worked on characters like Batman, Green Lantern, Plastic Man, and the Justice Society of America, and he was the current artist on the Dick Tracy newspaper strip. He really got into the spirit of things. Not only did he create a terrific cover, but he created the look of Starbuck Jones as well as his Star Wars–inspired logo, along with a couple of sidekicks—a robot and a little blue furry creature. And they were all perfect! In creating all of this, Joe basically teed things up for every other artist who I would eventually approach.

Joe was so great to work with that, down the road, we would even engineer a crossover between Funky Winkerbean and Dick Tracy. Tracy was one of the strips that inspired me when I was a kid, so the twelve-year-old in me was over the moon.  Still a geek. Working with one of my “phantoms” started to bring a certain materiality to things, and it brought me tantalizingly closer to the answer I was seeking. Plus, it looked like my Holy Grail quest was going to turn out to be a lot of fun. As Mort Meskin, the artist of my very first comic book once said, “Art is love on paper.”

From The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume 14

In an interesting coda to the above, I opened my mailbox one day to find that one of my readers, whose hobby is woodburning comic book covers, had done a woodburning of the Starbuck Jones cover. It now shares the top of the bookcase in my studio with the other cool stuff there.