In "Reason to be Excited," I spotlight things from modern comics that I think are worth getting excited about. I mean stuff more specific than "this comic is good," ya know? More like a specific bit from a writer or artist that impressed me.

Today, we look at how well Erik Larsen has used the character of Captain Tootsie in the pages of Savage Dragon in the last year.

Captain Tootsie was a superhero created to, you guessed it, sell Tootsie Rolls!

He had many of these comic book style ads in all different comic books throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s.

Captain Tootsie even had a brief ongoing series where he and his Secret Legion (a group of adventurous kids) traveled the stars together...

Years later, Herb Trimpe would use Captain Tootsie's costume as an inspiration for his design for Doc Samson's costume...

Erik Larsen has often worked public domain superheroes into Savage Dragon, although most of them were just brief appearance, while some of them (like the original Daredevil) became recurring characters. In last year's Savage Dragon #241, Larsen prominently featured Captain Tootsie, who had been in suspended animation for sixty years. Larsen, of course, homaged Trimpe's Hulk cover...

It appeared as though Captain Tootsie came to Canada to take Savage Dragon down, but it was all really a ploy to find a way to get back to his Secret Legion friends, who have aged little in their sixty years in space...

A cute bit in and of itself, but surprisingly, Larsen has since made Captain Tootsie a recurring character in the series, and he's used him to great effect by having him serve as a naive contrast to Malcolm Dragon's modern sensibilities.

Like recently, Malcolm has been besieged by some killer sex robots and here, Captain Tootie naively reprograms one and gives her an adorable name...

He then naively gives Malcolm her as a maid...

Funny bits, and as a comic relief character, Captain Tootsie would be fine (sort of like Baby Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy), but Larsen has cleverly gone in a different direction in the most recent issue of Savage Dragon, #246 (written/penciled by Larsen, colored by Niko Koutsis - flats by Mike Toris and lettered by Ferran Delgado), where the two heroes team-up to take on the deadly Scourge.

Along the way, there's some interesting contrast stuff, like the whole "Isn't it weird to be hanging out with a bunch of little kids?"...

The Scourge was one of those bad guys where things sort of got out of hand, but Malcom and Tootsie insist that he must face the legal repercussions of his actions....

And then some stuff happens that I won't spoil, but suffice it to say, Malcolm and Tootsie's world viewpoints on this topic are diametrically opposed to each other and it was very clever to see their contrast go from strictly comic relief stuff to something more substantial (not that the comic relief stuff wasn't good, as well, as it was).

Okay, this feature is a bit less of a reader-interactive one, as I'm just spotlight stuff in modern comics that specifically impressed ME, but heck, if you'd like to send in some suggestions anyways, maybe you and I have the same taste! It's certainly not improbably that something you found cool would be something that I found cool, too, so feel free to send ideas to me at brianc@cbr.com!