John Barry can be reached at (727) 892-2258 or comics changes we announced last month become official today, beginning with the launch of Lio, the daily and Sunday strip by Mark Tatulli. I might break out with a show tune in the middle of the Acme grocery. "Do my kids think I'm weird? Are you kidding me? They don't even want to go to the store with me. Especially when Dad gets out of the basement. Then again, the Tatulli family is used to strange things. 'No,' I say, 'the cops don't allow monsters to go inside houses.' My son used to swear he could hear a ladder thumping against the side of the house." The big thing is the fears they have that remind me of the fears I had as a kid. "It's not so much what they do, it's what they say. In drawing Lio, Tatulli channels any of his own three children. You may spend more than the usual seven seconds you'd spend on a cartoon. You figure out what's happening by just looking at it. Wordless cartoons, he says, "are a kind of puzzle.
Tatulli thinks of himself as a visual person more than a verbal one. "Pantomime strips" like Lio are something of a lost art.
Tatulli had lost a day job designing opening scenes for reality TV shows in Philadelphia and found himself with time to invent a new strip. It's about a little girl living in Philadelphia, and it's bursting with Tatulli's manic whimsy, but it's told mostly in words. "Lio's eyes are a reflection of that willingness to believe."īack in 1997, Tatulli published his first nationally syndicated comic strip, called Heart of the City. Lio's vacuous holes for eyes are like the blank stare of innocence that kids show when they're told some "big, crazy story" that can't possibly be true, except that, maybe, in a kid's mind, it might be true. I put a line over the 'o' because I liked the way it looked." "I wanted a name that was short, sweet, almost foreign. It sounds Italian, but it's purely Tatullian. "That was the feeling I wanted to generate." Gahan Wilson's gothic monster masterpieces were another huge influence. He learned literacy as a child by reading the National Lampoon and Mad magazines his dad tried to hide from him.
How to otherwise explain Lio? Tatulli has been wanting to draw something like it for years.
Remember the comic strip Henry? Lio's like Henry, if you can imagine Henry drawn by Salvador Dali. It's so packed with monsters that Tatulli leaves out words. It's a new strip being launched today in about 90 newspapers nationwide. So though he lives in a sunless dungeon, he looks "fabulous.")
Most of the time, Tatulli lives and draws in the basement, in what he calls his dungeon, which is full of "old spells and magic wands." (His wife, Donna, runs a tanning salon. Cozy up to your favorite Snuggied cephalopod with Reheated Lio.He shares a "Spielbergian" home in the Jersey suburbs with his wife, three kids and three "nefarious cats." They live upstairs. Sneaky's Jokes and Gags can make archery practice more fun, along with the many uses of spiders-including their essential roles in Girl Scout cookie procurement and as a quality pizza condiment. Inside Reheated Lio, readers learn how Mr. Fans of Liorecognize the spiky-haired ghostly pale youngster as a curious scientist, a comic-book fan, the defender of the defenseless, and the creator of a legion of zombie bunnies, flanked by his creepy coterie of friends, including giant squid Ishmael and the scythe-carrying grim reaper. Volck, Lio is a pantomime strip that tells its story without any dialogue or cartoon captions. Reheated Lio, the fourth Lio cartoon collection, includes 40 weeks of color Sunday strips as well as black-and-white daily strips.ĭrawn in the style of cartooning greats Gahan Wilson, Charles Addams, and 19th-century satirist A.
Emmy award-winning artist Mark Tatulli's comic strip, Lio, is dark, twisted, visually stunning and totally irresistible.ĭistinguished by Variety as "a fast riser," Mark Tatulli's morbidly mirthful comic strip Lio proves that happiness is indeed a modified Snuggie for you and your favorite eight-armed cephalopod.