Atlanta illustrator creates Golden Age comics for a modern audience

Atlanta comic book creator Rich Tommaso was already having a bad day before nearly being flattened by a tree. After a restless night spent tossing and turning from an agonizing tooth infection, he woke up and arranged a dental appointment first thing that January morning.

Later that day, heavily medicated and weary from a long return trip home on MARTA, Tommaso debated drawing at his lightbox for a few hours that night. “I just lost a whole day. And I thought, no, I’m too wiped out. I should just go to sleep. And an hour later, a tree came crashing through our house. It sounded like a bomb.”

The massive oak cut a gash straight through Tommaso and wife Amy’s space, missing the couple and their cats by mere feet and landing directly on top of his drawing station. “That’s where drawing comics could have killed me,” he said with a laugh, now able to see the humor in the situation some 11 months later.

Close calls with death are not common for the soft-spoken Tommaso, who spends most of his time crafting pristine comic pages in an unassuming studio in the corner of his Virginia Highland residence. On normal days, explosive action sequences are reserved for characters like Malcolm, the newbie secret agent in Tommaso’s “Spy Seal: The Corten Steel Phoenix,” recently reissued with bonus materials by indie publisher Floating World Comics.

Tommaso poses with a copy of his recently expanded and reissued "Spy Seal: The Corten Steel Phoenix." (Dustin Timbrook/Courtesy of Arts ATL)

An anthropomorphic spy thriller with the look of Belgian cartoonist Hergé’s “The Adventures of Tintin,” “Spy Seal” tells the story of a gentle everyman who bumbles his way into a sexy whirlwind of Soviet espionage and international art heists. Tommaso was only 13 when he conceived the character, but, when an updated sketch of the supersleuth went viral on Facebook in 2016, he knew who would star in his next book for Image Comics.

In typical Tommaso style, “Spy Seal” is rendered using the same tools and painstaking attention to detail as its visual influence. “It’s very hard to do when I put Hergé’s ‘Tintin’ in my head, because every bit of perspective … everything has to be just right. It’s very tight, clean work,” he said while flipping through colorful pages of his own immaculate inking.

A graduate of the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in New Jersey, Tommaso illustrates the old-fashioned way — starting with small concept sketches, enlarging to detailed pencil drawings, then tracing and hand lettering with ink using a brush or nib. Only the final coloring stage of the process takes place at a computer. “A lot of what I do now is imitating artists of different eras, and the best way to do that is to work with the same tools,” he said.

Tommaso illustrates the old-fashioned way, starting with small concept sketches, enlarging to detailed pencil drawings, then tracing and hand lettering with ink. (Dustin Timbrook/Courtesy of Arts ATL)

Tommaso’s passion for evoking the Golden Age of comic books is a major draw for backers of his crowdfunded magazine “Black Phoenix.” Started in 2019, the anthology series combines different genres of sequential art — including fake tabloid articles and advertisements — into a print publication mimicking pulp rags of the early to mid 20th century. From glamorous Hollywood romances to hard-boiled crime, highbrow New Yorker-inspired cartoons to Archie-style kitsch, Tommaso writes, illustrates and designs every single component and shares new pages with his Patreon supporters along the way.

Golden Age styling and themes are consistent throughout the series, but the publication’s format can fluctuate wildly. Depending on Tommaso’s whims, subscribers might receive a 50-page glossy magazine or a newspaper-sized comic printed on newsprint. This open-ended model allows Tommaso to pursue creative tangents in a way traditional publishers might resist but his Patreon community embraces.

“I’m just doing my own thing, and that would drive a publisher insane,” he said about the constantly shifting nature of “Black Phoenix.” “But I actually think that’s the reason why (my Patreon supporters) like the magazine. Because it’s different from what they’re getting from other publishers.”

Tommaso's many graphic worlds convene in his flat files. (Dustin Timbrook/Courtesy of Arts ATL)

Even Tommaso was surprised when his followers encouraged a recent digression, “Wally Dorsey’s Dracula,” a collection of faux animation cels, background art and promotional materials that imagines a world where ’30s-era Walt Disney Productions released a feature-length animated vampire film.

For Jeremy Stone, a “Black Phoenix” subscriber in Houston, Texas, following Tommaso’s creative side quests is all part of the fun. “He has touched on basically every genre that you can in comics,” Stone said. “Patreon gives him complete freedom to explore any story that he wants.”

Said Tommaso: “It’s like the best readership I’ve ever had. If I’m like, ‘This next issue’s gonna be late because I hurt my back really bad,’ everyone’s so understanding and supportive in that way. Not just financially.”

Stone admires Tommaso’s relentless dedication to his craft. “He has all this horrible stuff happen to him, and what he’s thinking about is getting back to the drawing board because that’s what he loves to do,” he said. “If I’m able to help, that’s great, because it allows him to create this art that also brings happiness to me and to others.”

COMIC BOOK

“Spy Seal: The Steel Corten Phoenix”

Available at floatingworldcomics.com and My Parents’ Basement in Avondale Estates.

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