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| Sucker Punch Spotlight | by Dave Sherrill |
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Dalton Sharp I gotta tell you the truth, I didn't like Dalton Sharp at first. I kept bumping into Dalton's entries in Strip Fight. They were a strange continuing story featuring a happy, rope skipping, pigtailed girl, and her thoughts on life. These comics completely ignored the weekly theme. I figured Dalton was just mocking those of us that were really desperately trying to hammer a good strip out of the theme. So I reviewed all the comics and under Dalton's name I left the quote  that was on my desk calendar, it had
nothing to do with his comics and seemed a good response to
what this jerk was up to. So Dalton reviewed my comic the next week with a quote. A good quote. A quote that made sense, and actually had a pretty good point. Who the hell does this jerk think he is? I started reading Dalton's Love is Lava on Live Journal to figure this guy out. I started reading Love is Lava and started liking it. REALLY liking it. Dalton's work is a morphic mess of a story spanning time and genre. Beautifully illustrated in thick black ink, and this guy was doing nine panels a day, for free with, for the most part, no comments from anyone. Dalton wasn't making fun of anyone on the Strip Fight, he wasn't making any point at all. that's just the way he does things. I ended up commenting on how much I liked his work and we chatted it up a bit on-line, I would even go so far as to call Dalton a friend of mine. Now if I could just learn to ink like he does… Here's the Q & A.  STUMBLEBUM STUDIOS - Your comics are really pretty far out,
and beautifully illustrated. They remind me of Will
Eisner and Jeff Smith's Bone (heh
heh). Who are your influences?DALTON SHARP - Haha - I'm old enough to have bought Bone number 2 at the comic shop! Not to mention Teen Titans number 1. I just read a ton of comics as a kid so I guess did practically everybody. Everybody smoked in the 70's and nobody thought it was strange that a seven-year old would buy packs of cigarettes so I used to buy my parents and their friends smokes and usually keep the change or get a quarter or whatever which would buy a double pack of old comics. So doing this twice a day I was getting like 12 comics a day. The economics of comics are screwed up now, because 12 comics a day would be over $40?!!! I don't even think most corner stores have that many comics for sale now. There's really a crisis in comics - they've become luxury items. I know I sound like a grumpy old man but comics are supposed have stuff spilled on them, to be traded around - they're never supposed to be in plastic.
SS - You've been in the Daily Grind for quite a while now,
doing 9 panel illustrations of your Love is Lava comic
everyday of the work week, and most of the time you enter
the Strip Fight on the weekend. What do you do in all your
free time? DS - I get kinda grumpy and resentful if I'm doing
illustration jobs so I do practically none. I work at a
newspaper call center taking classifieds. I've been doing it
so long that I think I should do a comic story based on it.
I work with some real characters and one guy suggested
having a mysterious classified ad that has appeared daily
with the same wording since the beginning of the paper.
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DS - Sadly my beer league hockey has gone out the window.
Strip Fight has mostly fallen away too. I hang out with
friends from my apartment building. Man, how boring. But
true.