Zipatone, Then and Now

I always liked zipatone. You know, the transparent film with a printed pattern that an artist would x-acto-cut and affix to his drawing to achieve certain shading effects.

I liked zipatone as a comic reader, I liked it when I was drawing comics-related artwork of my own, and I'm not the only one who liked it; here is a nice article about zipatone that I found.

At this point I haven't used any zipatone in decades, and they even stopped manufacturing it about twenty years ago. As a lark I bought a few pages of zipatone on ebay last month and (if the adhesive on those pages still has some stickiness to it) I'll make use of the zip in some upcoming artwork.

In the meantime, maybe I'll show you a couple of my 1980s drawings where I used the stuff. The Dr. Fate Versus Dr. Strange above (published in The Buyer's Guide #483, 2/1983, larger version over here) refers to zipatone by name, while the Creature Commandos and Bob Kanigher below (from TBG #497, 5/1983, larger over here) displays a more typical use of zipatone on the rocket ship. (By the way, Mr. Kanigher got such a kick out of my Creature Commandos drawing that he reprinted it on the letters page of Sgt. Rock #397 in 1984.)

Hooray for zipatone! (...and may it rest in peace...)