Filthy Richie Comic (#10 Mar 1971)

When I was a kid I really loved Harvey Comics (Casper, Richie Rich, Hot Stuff, etc), so this is my homage to them.

The figures were drawn in pencil, inked with a pen and then scanned and colored in Photoshop. The text and various graphic elements were created in my ancient copy of Freehand (which I have since put out to pasture and replaced with Illustrator) and imported into Photoshop where everything was assembled.

Then after I got everything looking just so, I had fun messing it all up by adding dirt, tears and aging effects to make it look like a 30 year old comic that someone found in their attic.

This "Morton Comics" cover layouts are an amalgam of my favorite old school comic cover elements. Back in the late 1960s & early 1970s, DC Comics had a checkerboard stripe across the top of all their books. This served two purposes; it helped identify the comic as a DC book when you were thumbing through them from above on the newstand or comic rack, and it looked "mod." Marvel comics always had a box in the upper left corner that contained a little image of the star character, again to help you spot your favorite book as you fanned through a stack. And lastly, Harvey Comics always had the large title character logo, with a small descriptive blurb underneath, as in "Casper, the Friendly Ghost."

By the way, "Morton Comics" doesn't mean anything; I was just trying to come up with a name similar to "Harvey."

Wow, can you believe there was a time when comics cost 15 cents? They cost $4 now!