Artie Stick is a broken piece of wood. His wife is a mayonnaise jar. His bastard son Bart went on to TV fame. Such is life. I dreamed Artie up in 1972, while I was a college student in Missouri. He's very "artistic." Not!

Artie was featured in Realm, Platinum Toad, and Scrabbis Treno, among other fine periodical publications under the Everyman Comics/Everyman Studios imprint. If you find any of these comics, please burn them. This will help make my copies more rare and valuable.

In the mid-Seventies Marvel started putting dialogue balloons on their covers, and using staff artists like Marie Severin and Jim Mooney to draw them. Boy, was I torqued off. So I drew this cover for my zine Cascade Comix Monthly #7, September, 1978. Get it? Whatever.

This was drawn on coquille board, a textured illustration paper that cartoonists sometimes use to get halftone effects without the problems (background, fuzzy lines) of screening art. It makes inking kind of hard, but oh baby those shading effects! Hey, I'm starting to sound like one of those other featured comic book artists! Wah!

At some point in the dim, dark past, I was an aspiring fan artist. Or maybe a perspiring fan artist--yeah, that too. I must have gotten illoes like this one pubbed in about 50 different fanzines. Yeah, I wanted to work for Marvel. This is a pencil sketch for one of those spot illoes.

I always thought this title sounded like "scofflaw." In 1971, when editors started to invite me to draw covers for their zines, I thought I was hot stuff. Marvel Comics, here I come. Lots of fannish friends ended up there, or at DC. Carl Gafford, Tony Isabella, Mike Kaluta, Roy Thomas, just a bunch. But I was destined to draw a different kind of comic book...

Will Eisner was really cool. The Spirit was tough. And what was neat about it was that it took an alternative route of distribution. It was a comic book that was printed to be distributed in Sunday newspapers.

This is another preliminary sketch for a fanzine illo. The editors who published my work usually never sent my originals back, and sometimes I didn't even get a complimentary copy (or even a derogatory copy) of the issue with my work. Hey, you zine editors! Treat your artists better!

So now it's 1977 and the Everyman Studios artists are all trying to draw their best comic ever, Realm 7. This is Artie Stick as a primitive TV hologram, in the intro to "Mad Scientist Plot." It was a mad plot alright; even I didn't get it.

This was supposed to be the start of a story, but I never made it past this panel. It's an OK panel, but I couldn't figure out what the story was about, or I spilled paint water on the thing, or whatever. Below is a detail. I was really good at drawing stoned hippies.

If you've made it this far, you must be a glutton for punishment. So check out these other Artie Romero enabled sections of ClickMedia: