A Flatlander's Guide to Maine

Mark Scott Ricketts is a Maine-based Arkansas-born illustrator who has enjoyed national success in advertising, graphic novels, and comic books, including as author of several Iron Man comics. Ricketts published A Flatlander’s Guide to Maine with Islandport Press in 2013, and Adventures in Vacationland in 2014.

Ricketts was born in Stuttgart, Arkansas, in 1955, the son of the proprietor of a fast food and soft serve establishment called The Dairy Creme. He attended Arkansas State University in Jonesboro where he studied painting under landscape artist Roger Carlisle. Ricketts moved to Chicago in 1979 to start a band, but also worked there as a freelance illustrator, a talent he developed into his career. He got his big break as a writer and illustrator in 1990 when Caliber Comics agreed to publish his first book Warpwalking. In 2000, Image published Rickett’s graphic novel Nowheresville, a mystery set in 1950s Greenwich Village that combines Beat Generation culture with hard-boiled pulp crime fiction. He also created a graphic novel for Dark Horse entitled Lazarus Jack and wrote four issues of Marvel's The Invincible Iron Man for the Avengers Disassembled event. 

Ricketts and his wife moved to Maine in 2006. He continues to work as an illustrator for national publishers. For two years, he also wrote and self-syndicated the comic strip, Moose Mountain. 

"Ricketts's colorful illustrations pop from the pages, and you get a chance to see some of the full range of his talents as an artist as well as humorist."
––The Maine Edge

"Maine may have top-drawer humorists like John McDonald and Tim Sample, but now we can add cartoonist and satirist Mark Ricketts to that august list."
––Bill Bushnell, The Kennebec Journal