Stinely Stellwick

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STINELY STELLWICK – That Mahogany Chicken Head (1981)

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Artwork © 2010, Rick Grimes

GRIMES: “This is the only completed work in this favoured panel format for ‘Weird Dick & Friends’ stories. There are several strips, one pagers , idea notes and initial story pages, but few using and none complete in this format. A sort of ‘LIFE’ magazine approach. Although a little at the margins, Stinely is an essential character in many of these.

“His head enshrining a family furniture set, with us from before my birth. His unusual name a conflation of ’60s television writer Stirling Silliphant, a familiar on screen sight in my childhood and the oddly named and rather obscure actor, Shepperd Strudwick, (Perry Mason, Twilight Zone, The Monitors), noticed at the time.

“The middle panels of the 2nd page are a bit less well-sculpted than they should have been. The story more of an introduction. I wasn’t used to moving him around in a story landscape yet— some of these types of complex-looking characters are a little harder to draw repeatedly.

“I was stupid enough to send it to Charlton Comics for the inevitable bewildered reply. Guess I thought they’d let me draw the Flintstones. (Aim low).

“Never published, it predates and dispels the ‘myth’ of his death in the self-parodic Sicky Claws. He never says much, except in a very specifically oblique manner. But is still alive and well, and living in the edges of my mind.” — RG (June 10th, 2009).

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Artwork © 2009, Rick Grimes

GRIMES: “Character development of Stinely Stellwick, also with drawings of Emmett Bennett Everett (aka ‘Fmeh’ in Sicky Claws) from the same notebook, 1980?, later loaned to (and returned by) Steve Bissette who included them in cameo, alongside Weird Dick, in his black & white story Kultz.” — RG (May 27th, 2009).

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