Someone recently posted a comment mentioning that they are used to my “effusive praise of other artists” to which I replied “if it seems I only effusively praise other artists that is because I only mention artists who work I truly admire… ones I think suck I just don’t talk about. My mom always said, “If you can’t say anything nice…””

Too true. I don’t dislike everything I do not take the time to post about… far from it. But I do wholeheartedly love and admire that which I do take the time to post about.

Like the comic strip “LIO“.

I’m friends with LIO and “Heart of the City” creator Mark Tatulli, but that has nothing to do with my post today. While “Heart of the City” is a solid strip which I very much enjoy, Mark moved up about 10 levels in my (admittedly meager) book when he started LIO. I’m a sucker for pantomime cartooning, and LIO is one of those strips that consistently makes me smile or laugh out loud with nary a word used. Some cartoonists have a schtick or formula they stick close to and are successful with… a single voice if you will. Mark shows how creativity can branch out into another realm and bottle the lightning all over again from a totally different storm. LIO is as different from HEART as apples and oranges, but Mark wields the pen with great prowess in both strips.

Last year “LIO” won a divisional award from the National Cartoonist Society for best comic strip, and well deserved in my opinion. It’s a great strip and well worth reading either in your local paper or online.

Comic Strips are a tough business. The newspaper market keeps shrinking and its harder and harder to get in enough papers to make a living doing a daily strip. I know a lot of cartoonists who do syndicated newspaper strips and that all say the same thing… what would have been a hit strip back in the 80′s struggles to get off the ground today. Many complain that part of the problem are “legacy” strips that stay in the comics pages long after they are either stale and no longer relevant or after their creators have passed the strip on to their kids or other artists and writers. Comics are like comfort food… newspaper readers like seeing the strips they saw as kids still in the comics. That and the shrinking market make breaking in with a new strip very difficult.

One of the few recent success stories with daily strips is Mark Tatulli‘s “Lio”, a daring pantomime strip with a unique art style and edgy humor. Lio is Mark’s latest strip… he also has a daily called “Heart of the City” that has been around for 10 years. The two strips could not be more different.

I’ve met Mark several times at the National Cartoonists Society Rueben weekends. He’s a great guy and very derserving of his success. The Cartoon Art Museum’s Andrew Farago recently did an interview with Mark for The Comics Journal, and excpert of which you can read here. The article is very insightful into the world of daily strips syndication and the challenges cartoonists face today. I will be hunting down the latest issue of TCJ to read the full article. In the meantime check out the excerpt.

For more reading about working int he comic strip business, Alan Gardner‘s fantastic blog The Daily Cartoonist has a post today with links to articles by several strip cartoonists about how they became syndicated.