Rich Tommaso 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, Tommaso woke up and called a dentist first thing that January morning. “They told me to get over there. I had no car, so I had to take a bus. It was like a whole day thing,” he recalled.

Heavily medicated and weary from a long MARTA journey home, 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,” he remembers. “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 apartment, 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 laughed, 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 home 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 re-issued with bonus materials by indie publisher Floating World Comics. 

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 years old when he originally 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 explained while flipping through colorful pages of his own immaculate inking. 

A graduate of The Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, 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 explained. “There’s nothing that beats doing it the way the original artist did it.”

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 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 actual 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.”

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, following Tommaso’s creative sidequests is all part of the fun. “He has touched on basically every genre that you can in comics . . . Patreon gives him complete freedom to explore any story that he wants.”

“It’s like the best readership I’ve ever had,” said Tommaso, who is grateful for fans who are just as supportive of his livelihood as his art. “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.” When the tree destroyed Tommaso’s home in January, he immediately informed subscribers that the next issue of Black Phoenix would be delayed. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh, don’t worry. Take your time.’”

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 mused. “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.”

Copies of Spy Seal: The Steel Corten Phoenix are now available online at Floating World Comics and locally at My Parents’ Basement in Avondale Estates.

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Dustin Timbrook is a creative generalist working in art, film and music. He volunteers on the board of directors for the Avondale Arts Alliance. Timbrook loves spending time with his family, playing with dogs and gardening.