Favorite Comic Artist Countdown #22 - Tom Sutton!

Tom Sutton is yet another of those distinctive artists who brought a specific flavor to his work, which was done for Charlton, Marvel, Warren, DC and others. Since his forte was horror, his ghostly work at Charlton and Warren was likely the best stuff he knocked out, it's the stuff I crave from him. (He drew the very first satirical Vampirella story as it turns out.) Of all the many artists who have tried to visualize the amorphous and ambiguous notions of H.P. Lovecraft, Tom Sutton was the best to my eye. He had that sense of omnipresent decay which permeates most all of Lovecraft's work and no one that I no of drew chiseled teeth with more alarm than Sutton. Sutton has been hailed by Charlton fans for along time and like many of the Bronze Age stalwarts seemed to get his own comic to showcase his stylings. Creepy Things was Sutton's and his covers for that comic are among the most delightfully rotten images put through a four-color press. But as good as he was at horror, Sutton was also quite good at other things, especially satire which is evidenced by his work on Not Brand Echh and the one-shot for Byron Priess called Schlomo Raven Public Detective. Sutton drew damn good sci-fi too, his antic style bristling with energy on each page. Sutton could ink too and I love it when he paired up with masters like Gil Kane on Warlock and such. But it always comes back to horror with Sutton, that's his core and that core is beautifully decayed.

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