Mark Tatulli

Just who is Mark Tatulli, and how did he come up with "Lío"? To find out, let's go back in time ...

Another wistful summer day draws to a close in New Jersey, Mark's beloved home state. Artistically frustrated, he decides to take a solitary walk along the beach. Puffing on a cheap cigarette, he takes off his shoes and starts brooding on his career, leaving his footprints in the eddying wake of the receding tide.

What do I do next? I want to entertain readers—millions of 'em, young and old — but I want to do something fresh and unorthodox to shake up the funny pages. In the midst of his nicotine-fueled reverie, he feels a sharp stabbing pain in his right foot. He stops and looks down. Oh great ... I just stepped on a hypodermic needle. He bends down and gingerly removes the tip of the needle from his big toe. Standing upright, he suddenly takes stock of his surroundings. Oh man, I'm standing in a veritable pile of hypodermic needles. How did all these wash up onto the shore anyway? And why is it always New Jersey? These never wash up in Malibu. God only knows what I'll catch from this. He carefully extracts himself from the field of needles, takes one last drag from his cigarette, and flips it toward the sea with his thumb and forefinger, watching the glowing red arc of the spent butt as it lands in the water and extinguishes itself. It's time to head home, he says to a weathered seagull standing amid the syringes.

Later that evening, Mark turns in early, telling his wife he doesn't feel quite right. He immediately slides into a dark pool of sleep. In less than a minute, his pulse rate starts to quicken, he begins to sweat, and his body is seized by spasms as he writhes in a trancelike state of unconsciousness. In a fever-dream state, the mind of Mark Tatulli begins to unwind and refocus at the same time.

Gotta do something dark ... Yeah, a funny but dark comic strip. No more trite talking animals. No more cutesy families and their smug sense of suburban happiness. WWCAD? What would Charles Addams do?... Eureka! I'll do a pantomime comic strip about a boy who loves vampires and snakes and squids, and who loves to build robots and live in his imagination.

The very next morning, Mark sat down at a drawing table and started sketching the first images of Lío, a slightly devious, highly mischievous boy who taunts the nightmarish creatures beneath his bed, pulls pranks on his father and performs scientific experiments in his basement. Little did Mark Tatulli know that his solitary twilight walk along the Jersey shore would yield such fruit. The dark, sometimes surreal humor of "Lío" has now found a beloved place in readers' hearts: It was the fastest-selling comic strip launched by Universal Uclick since "Calvin and Hobbes." And in 2009, "Lío" won the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award for best Newspaper Comic Strip.

With "Lío," Mark's dream of an "edgy comic strip that tells a story without text with a modern audience in mind" has finally been realized. The result is a mind-bendingly funny journey into the darkly detailed world of young Lío and his bizarre creature co-stars. And nowadays, Mark wears shoes when he walks along the beaches of New Jersey.