Illustrator Ronn Sutton still honing his craft 50 years on
Elvira artist takes on the African jungle
In the basement studio of his Ottawa South home, Ronn Sutton is busy keeping well ahead of deadline on his latest art assignment, a Web-based comic inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1915 serialized novella, The Man-Eater.
The story is a classic old-style adventure that opens in the jungle of the Belgian Congo, with murderous connections to a dispute over a family estate inheritance in the United States. The ominous title derives its name from a rather large lion that is, shall we say, integral to the plot.
The weekly strip, written by Martin Powell and coloured by Becka Kinzie, is one of the newest online comics from Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc., and represents something of a plum assignment for Sutton. The 65-year-old freelance artist, perhaps best known for his work on the iconic Elvira, Mistress of the Dark series (Claypool Comics) from 1998 to 2006, said he still loves the clear storytelling of the adventure comics, movies and TV shows he devoured as a kid growing up in Toronto in the 1960s — Tarzan, The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke and other classics. The Man-Eater is about as close as it gets to a Back to the Future gig for him.
Unlike most other teens of his vintage-obsessed boomer generation, Sutton said he wasn’t content with simply enjoying the gripping tales of derring-do as a fan — he wanted to illustrate these stories himself. Inspired by artists the likes of Alex Raymond, Al Williamson, Gray Morrow and Alberto Giolitti, and encouraged by his mother, Sutton dived headfirst into an uncertain career in comics.
By the time he was 16, Sutton was already submitting artwork to Marvel Comics, which was roundly rejected, and at age 19 had moved away from home to join a tight-knit community of comic-book artists in upstate New York. He camped out on the living-room couch of his artist friend Bernie Wrightson (Swamp Thing) for two months before being gently booted out to find other digs.
“I had a lot of chutzpah back then, but I was bound and determined that I was going to do comic books,” Sutton said. “I wanted to get some experience, and I guess what I really learned was to set high standards and not settle for doing crappy work.”
Over the next 50 years, Sutton would go on to produce an ever-improving body of work in comics, animation and graphic illustration that would garner him multiple Aurora Award nominations for Artistic Achievement. His extensive portfolio includes work on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (T.E. Comics), Honey West (Moonstone), Lucifer’s Sword MC (Motorbooks) and Natural Born Outlaws (History Channel), as well as ghost artist assignments from mainstream strips such as Judge Parker and Rex Morgan M.D.
For the past 30 years, Sutton has also been enjoying the company of his love interest and sometime creative partner Janet Hetherington, an award-winning science fiction writer, comics creator and, most recently, screenwriter for Ottawa filmmaker Brett Kelly’s upcoming film noir production of Murder in High Heels. Sutton has done the poster artwork for several of Kelly’s productions. For a time, Sutton and Hetherington also worked together on the Elvira series, which played in Sutton’s favour as Hetherington would be sure to include script elements she knew he liked to draw. The two are usually seen sharing table space at comic conventions, and have just come off successful appearances as guest artists at Ottawa ComicCon and FantastiCom in Montreal.
It was while Sutton was working on Elvira, Mistress of the Dark that he made a deliberate move to slow things down so that he could spend the time he felt he needed to produce better quality output. It wasn’t a great move financially, he said — he was getting paid by the page, after all — but it was good for him creatively.
“My goal was that from then on every story I drew had to be better than the previous one,” he said. “I didn’t want to be knocking these stories off just for the money.”
Sutton clearly likes doing things the old way, and at an unhurried pace. Down in his studio, a retrocave filled with comics, reference books and small action figures, a classic rotary dial telephone sits within easy reach. He does not own a cellphone, nor does he employ the magic of Photoshop in his craft.
It takes Sutton about three days to produce the artwork for each weekly script of The Man-Eater. He works everything out first by hand on plain copy paper, then uses a Xerox machine to try various compositions and proportions until he is satisfied with the rough design. If the process seems a bit Old School in an age when many other artists are using computer software to manipulate their “pencils,” he has a good reason for doing things this way.