Joe Staton

Ok, we need to get one thing straight. I am not the Joe Staton who played first base for the Detroit Tigers in the early seventies. I'm the other one. He was 6'3". I'm 5'6". I'm the short one. That's the easiest way to tell us apart.

I've been in New York for over thirty years (excepting three years when I was in Chicago, pretending to be an art director for the doomed First Comics), but I am originally a Southerner. I was born in North Carolina, grew up in Tennessee (where I shook hands with Albert Gore, Sr. and Davy Crockett -- or at least Fess Parker) and went to college in Kentucky. This part of the world is called the Mid-South. You can't fool me about barbeque. I know my barbeque.

I've been making my living drawing comic books for almost exactly thirty years. I started working for Charlton Comics April 19, 1971. Nicola Cuti and I did E-Man and Michael Mauser at Charlton. No matter whtever else I do, that's what I usually get mentioned for. Fair enough. It was good stuff.

I've done tons of stuff for DC since the mid-seventies. All-Star Squadron, Green Lantern, Guy Gardner, The Legion (yes, I know, I never did manage to tell the characters apart, especially as to who wore what boots), two different incarnations of The Huntress, The New Guardians (which wasn't as bad as some might have you believe), Action Comics, and Batman in various versions. I got an Eisner Award in '98 for World's Finest: The Superman-Batman Adventure, in the animated style.

I am currently the regular artist on the best-selling, most successful crime-detective book of recent memory -- Scooby Doo. The detectives are all underage, one of them is a large talking dog, and the crime is almost always real-estate fraud, but, hey, it just depends on how you look at things. I've done the Gargoyles and the Rugrats and Jonny Quest and the Wild Thornberrys and the little Coppertone girl and her doggie and a Mike Danger Sunday strip. I've worked for at least 27 publishers (bet you didn't know there were 27 publishers) and for at least 82 different editors. I drew the Classics Illustrated adaptation of The Christmas Carol. I've illustrated educational texts and workbooks, and storyboarded ads and animated websites.

But I bet my epitaph is going to have something to do with E-Man and Mauser...

...and maybe with Teddy Q, the dancing koala bear.