Our next Summer Reading List is courtesy of comics artist Ronn Sutton, joining us for the second year in a row. Please send us your list.

Ronn Sutton’s Summer Reading List

I’m Ronn Sutton, longtime comicbook penciller & inker. This has been a busy year and I currently have three projects on the go. I’ve just started drawing a 41-page kids’ graphic novel. It’ll be my third one this year for this particuliar company. Story is called Ghosts In The Hanger about a 15 year old girl with a summer job in an aeronautic museum haunted by the spirits of long dead pilots. A great opportunity to draw lots of neat planes.

I’m also just wrapping up 10 full page illustrations for The Phantom: Generations #12 from Moonstone. Its a 24 issue series of text adventure stories with accompanying illustrations featuring successive generations of The Phantom (each father hands down the costume to his son). My particular issue takes place during the French Revolution. I think I have three more drawings to finish at this point. The Phantom: Generations #12 should be in stores about February 2010.

Also for Moonstone I’ve just agreed to be one of three revolving creative teams on a Honey West comic, based on the 1960s detective novels of G.G.Fickling as well as a short-lived tv series starring Anne Francis. I’ll be working with writer Elaine Lee, best known for her play and comicbook series “Starstruck” (with Michael Kaluta). I’ve only just started doing character sketches and am awaiting final script.

I also continue to do periodic courtroom sketches for the newspapers and tv, including cases like the trial of convicted terrorist Momin Khawaja, and the Mayor of Ottawa Larry O’Brien.

You can find a selection of my comics artwork, courtroom sketches, animation art & magazine drawings at my website: www.ronnsutton.com

As to what I’m reading:

I’m currently reading Lamia by Tristan Travis, a book I read decades ago in galley form just before publication . Its a police procedural novel about ghastly sexual mutilation and murder of young men, written by someone with an obvious pseudonym and who knows far too much about police medical forensics to be making it up. The only book published by “Tristan Travis”. A hair-raising read.

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu was a gift from a friend and is about effects on creators in particuliar of the 1950s “Great Comic-Book Scare”.

For research reasons I’m starting to read the Honey West novels by G.G. Fickling starting with the first book This Girl For Hire. There are eleven books in the series. The author was actually the husband and wife team of Forrest and Gloria Fickling.

Never a fan of manga, I suddenly find myself reading some of the very thick horror manga by Junji Ito (GYO:The Death Death Creeps and UZUMAKI: Spiral Into Horror) and about to read some Kazuo Umezu (the Cat-Eyed Boy and The Drifting Classroom) and Naoki Urasawa (Monster). The work by Ito is fascinating. The stories are comprised of three 200 page books (600 pages!) of unique and very creepy horror unlike anything I’ve seen produced in North American comics.

There will be an array of audio-books for me to listen to while drawing comic pages and for inspiration I’ll be turning to hardcover EC-reprints of WEIRD SCIENCE and WEIRD FANTASY, mostly for the work by Wally Wood. Also never too far from my desk is BERNET, a collection of European comic artist Jordi Bernet’s work.

My favorite magazine continues to be From The Tomb, a fine British publication on horror comics from the 1950s to modern day. Issue #27 should literally be out any day now and features a six-page interview with yours truly.