When Bill Lutz isn’t answering questions about printer ink or ringing people up at the register at the Staples store in South Burlington, he’s drawing on a sketch pad he keeps handy — something that has caught the attention of many a customer.
Lutz trained at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and while he works at Staples to help pay the bills, his talent is undeniable. Even his boss is a client.
“He loves my artwork,” Lutz said. “I turned his niece into a Jedi Knight, and he got a movie poster out of it.”
Bill Lutz Credit: Ian Curry
Lutz, who specializes in illustration and cartooning, has been drawing since he was 6 years old and counts the classic superhero comics he grew up with in the 1980s as his biggest influences.
“I realized I could do this, and I finally could tell stories by drawing,” he said. “The most exciting part about it was, it was my world. I was creating stuff. It was one thing no one could take away.”
Lutz will draw anything and said he’s always open to commissions. He gave Seven Days a glimpse of his portfolio, which included illustrations of pet dogs, Martian explorers and original superheroes. He hopes his current project will blow his clients away.
“I have a couple that wants themselves turned into Viking superheroes in the Gothic age,” he said. “They’re going to display it at their wedding.”
Lutz is an artist with ambition. He’s spent years writing and illustrating his own graphic novel, Frontiersmen: Pathways, which he hopes to publish next year. It’s a genre-bending sci-fi saga spanning 500 pages that features dozens of original heroes and villains.
“Every character I’ve created, somebody posed for me, so that’s based on a real person,” Lutz said. “The ironic thing about it is everybody wants to be a bad guy,” he added.
The original print version of this article was headlined “On Full Display”
This article appears in The Cartoon Issue • 2026.