Filthy Richie Comic (#2 Jul 1970)

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.

For the dollar trail I drew one dollar in Photoshop, then cloned and rotated it until I had a whole trail of bills. Then I used the distort tool to lay the dollar trail down in perspective. You couldn't do that in the 1970s!

I really need to redo Richie's word balloon. That font really bothers me. Comic books were hand lettered up until the late 1990s, so I should go back and write it by hand to make it look more authentic.

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.

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!