Tim Fuller. Photo provided | Tim Fuller

This Community Voices column is written by Thomas Boeing, who owns Indie Northern Kentucky in Dayton with his wife, Ren. Each month, Boeing writes about a different artist featured at iNK. You can reach him at tom@indienky.com.

Long gone are the days of goofy ads in the back of comic books for x-ray glasses and sea monkeys. But ads like these can be found – or, at least, parodies of ads like these – in the pages of Tim Fuller’s Sham Comics.

Tim Fuller is a Northern Kentucky artist who has been creating his own comics since middle school. He’s been creating and selling his own comics since before modern comic convention culture was even a thought – like, only two conventions on either side of the country.

What is a Community Voices column?

To make space to hear from more Northern Kentuckians, we launched a new feature called Community Voices. These will be regular columns that aren’t quite news stories but also aren’t exactly opinion – they’re somewhere in the middle. We want to be a vehicle for you to share your expertise and the stories behind them with Northern Kentucky. 

If you think you have a voice the community would like to hear, please submit three to five writing samples to mgoth@linknky.com. 

The samples should be somewhere between 500 and 750 words, and do not need to be previously published somewhere else, but it’s OK if they were. .

If we select you, we’d ask that you submit your Community Voices column with some regularity, whether that be weekly, biweekly or monthly. Your columns would also need to include your name as the author: We can’t accept pen names or pseudonyms. 

Not everyone who applies will get to be a Community Voice. While we don’t expect you to know AP style, we do expect submissions to adhere to correct grammar, spelling and punctuation. We will edit slightly to make sure submissions fit our style. We also won’t accept submissions that are a promotion for you, or a product or service. (If you’re looking for a way to promote your company, product or service, email our VP of sales, Brad Crosby, at bcrosby@linknky.com.)

We’re looking forward to hearing from you! 

Fuller’s main main genre of comics had always been silly, cartoon animal comics. That is, until 2007, when he noticed something interesting about public domain.

While Fuller was researching a project about old, public domain films, he noticed that there were also comic books whose copyright had expired. He got his toes wet making parodies of just the ads – the x-ray glasses and sea monkeys – in local comics anthologies. The positive reaction to the parody ads pushed him to try it with an old, golden age comic, Bozo the Iron Man. Smash Comics was the title where Bozo first appeared, but Fuller decided to go with the name Sham Comics. 

The premise of Fuller’s public domain comics is simple and brilliant: Fuller finds an old comic that is in the public domain. He creatively changes the narration and word balloons to fit his own twisted story. Then he uses his years of artistic skill to make sure everything looks seamless, as if it had actually been printed that way decades ago. It’s smart, it’s fun, and it doesn’t require him to spend hours hunched over a drawing table. 

In the last eight years, Fuller has created nearly 30 Sham Comics. Some are single issues that play off golden age comics, some are parodies of Chick Tract religious comics, and then there are collections of them all. But he still takes the time to write and draw his own comics.

His current project is a partnership with Craig Boldman – of Archie Comics fame. 

Boldman writes and Fuller draws Cap’n Catnip. While Fuller has created so many comics over the years, he says his favorite that he’s drawn is a comic about a grouchy, chain smoking zombie named Marge who may or may not have owned a baseball team in her past life.

Fuller is a prolific comics artist in the Northern Kentucky/Cincinnati area and his comics can be found in almost every comic shop on either side of the river. You’re almost guaranteed to see him at a local comic convention and when you do, go check out his stuff – the art, storytelling, and humor are top notch. 

If you have an idea for a Community Voices column, email Meghan Goth at mgoth@linknky.com.

Click here to read more Community Voices columns.