1st: Have you ever gotten any really weird commission requests, if so what?
Joe: I guess most of my ‘weird’ commissions tended to involve Scooby Doo, and that’s mostly just Scoob and the crew in various superhero outfits. Although there was the soldier from Jersey who kept on having me draw Barbie Benton holding an M16.
1st: How do you start out creating a commission once you have the character?
Joe: The characters determine how they’ll look. If it’s a GL, they may turn up in space. Or create things with their rings. The JSA or the Bat-Family, I try to keep the 1940’s look or try to involve some homage to Wally Wood. He set it up in the first All-Star Squad or whatever it was called.
1st: Is Hilarie a big part of why you have been so successful?
Joe: In the 70’s, Hilarie would come in from teaching Special Ed and set up to start filling blacks on HULK pages. These days, she just took a break from doing computer work on our taxes to help me understand the instructions for installing some new window blinds. Yep, she’s indispensable, not to mention adorable.
1st: What about drawing “Scooby-Doo” did you enjoy the most?
Joe: I really got into the location work with Scoob. The stories were set all over: castles, New Orleans swamps, lots of ‘haunted’ houses. There was a problem with one of our editors who decided that ‘Burbank’ had passed down an edict to cut down on the locations. You can’t run around and hide unless you have places to run and hide.
1st: What personality did your art give to Dick Tracy?
Joe: Dick Tracy’s personality for me was what Chester Gould had created for him, modified over the years. That was a tough, relentless co, who went home to Tess and Bonnie Braids. He was a mix.
1st: You worked for a long time at DC Comics. Do you have any favorite characters you worked on there?
Joe: Of course, my favorites were Huntress (Helena Wayne) and Guy Gardner, both of whom I had a hand in co-creating and designing. I also enjoyed any JSA characters from Earth II, especially GL (Alan Scott) and Flash (Jay Garrick). I often say I’m most at home on Earth II.
1st: How do you think the Huntress has evolved since you first co-created her?
Joe: Well, Helena Wayne hasn’t changed a lot since a wall fell on her in CRISIS. Helena Bertinelli has become darker and more brutal to make her a part of the current Bat-Family.
1st: Will E-Man ever make a comeback?
Joe: In the sense of there ever being another issue of an E-MAN, no, there won’t be. We know that we need Nicola Cuti for that. However, Hilarie and I are involved with a project to create all-prose adventures featuring the Independent Press characters from the 80’s. The writers are doing prose adventures in contrast to writing comic scripts for their normal artist partners to draw. We wrote a Michael Mauser detective story for the first volume of LEGENDS OF THE INDIE COMICS, and we have an E-Man and Nova story for the second volume. Our stories are presented as being “in memory of Nicola Cuti”.
1st: What is it you enjoy most about attending conventions?
Joe: There is always somebody who remembers that I drew the first comic he read or bought with his own money. Or somebody will want me to sign a book I don’t remember doing at all. And I always really like meeting cosplayers playing as my characters. I have some cool photos of me with the whole JSA.
1st: How are you liking your semi-retirement?
Joe: I like not having to hit specific deadlines all the time, and I’ll get stretches when I actually get to work on the house as I had planned, Occasionally I wind up with a drawing project, and I’ll be back to daily drawing. The SKETCHES ON THE SIDEWALK book that my pal Paul Levitz recruited me to draw for the NY Board of Ed was certainly worth keeping to a schedule. I still do commissions at cons or through my website. I can’t quite get the balance, but it all works pretty well.
1st: What would you like to say to your many fans?
Joe: Remember that thanks to the extremely clever Karla Southern, I have a nice website at: JoeStaton.com. There is a good sample of my drawings there, along with photos. That’s the best way to contact me for cons or commissions. Check Amazon for the Mauser story in LEGENDS OF INDIE COMICS: WORDS ONLY Vol I. I think it’s available now. Vol II should be available sometime this year. I’ll sign the books for free at cons. Come by, say hello.
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