Looking Back: Who Did I Copy?

I’m lis­ten­ing to The Art & Sto­ry pod­cast, Episode 004 «The Big Style». Mark Rudolph and Jerzy Drozd are reach­ing back into their ear­ly com­ic influ­ences. Com­ic artists are absolute­ly the first illus­tra­tors that inspired me to copy them and do what they do. It’s got­ten me think­ing about who my ear­ly influ­ences were — and when I say «ear­ly» I mean cer­tain­ly before art skool. I’m look­ing back rough­ly at ages twelve to sev­en­teen. This is who I copied and who I wished I could be like.

John Byrne

Yes, I have to con­fess I was a John Byrne fan­boy. His work on X‑Men and Iron Fist just grabbed me and was respon­si­ble for my being drawn to comics in the first place. I’ll nev­er for­get find­ing all those ear­ly Byrne issues (with­out cov­ers) in the base­ment. They were John Byrne Iron Fist and I think Carmine Infan­ti­no Ghost Rid­er. Byrne’s ear­li­er work was filled with detail (at least com­pared to many of his con­tem­po­raries, and to his lat­er work as well) and though he fol­lowed many com­ic-book con­ven­tions, the work was­n’t over­sim­pli­fied the way I thought Ditko and Kir­by’s work was.

In ret­ro­spect, I have to give Ter­ry Austin some of the cred­it. No one ever inked Byrne’s pen­cils the way that Austin did. Austin’s linework is expert and it took a few years to begin to under­stand the rela­tion­ship between an inker and a pen­ciller. I’m list­ing him out of order of my aware­ness of his influ­ence because his work was a huge part of what I copied.

Paul Smith

Paul Smith was my favorite illus­tra­tor for years. Going back and look­ing at his work I’m a lit­tle more crit­i­cal of it than I was, but there’s still some­thing about his work I find com­pelling. He used clean lines, good bal­ance of shad­ow and light, and his style is unclut­tered. Some­times his fig­ures are a lit­tle wood­en and awk­ward; it might just be the lens of nos­tal­gia, but even that seems to make the style more endear­ing. There’s a sort of dig­ni­ty to the stiff­ness in his pos­es, and that might be the impor­tant part. Even when he over­sim­pli­fied, Paul Smith’s work was always full of care and respect for his sub­jects. Even when read­ing a super­hero com­ic book, a read­er wants to feel the artist is invest­ed in telling the sto­ry well. That Smith pulled this off is to his cred­it. (Note: I just can’t resist link­ing to the Sequen­tial Tart write­up of X‑Men 168, the issue from which the pan­el here came. Maris­sa Sam­my loves how Paul Smith drew Kit­ty Pryde, so I sus­pect she and I would get along.)

Neal Adams

Neal Adams’ work appealed to me for much the same rea­son as Byrne’s, and this will fore­shad­ow some­one else on this list. Adams’ work looks like com­mer­cial illus­tra­tion from the late fifties or ear­ly six­ties. While Byrne’s work looks like comics, Adams’ work (more than a decade before Byrne got start­ed) tran­scend­ed comics. His work was of a cal­i­bre not pre­vi­ous­ly seen in a medi­um that takes it’s name from sten­cil draw­ings on the sides of car­tons. I don’t want to tram­ple the work of many of the greats whose work I’ve since come to appre­ci­ate, but with only a few excep­tions before the late six­ties artists with tra­di­tion­al illus­tra­tion skills weren’t rep­re­sent­ed in comics. Not only did Adams’ work have a life and flu­id­i­ty to it, he also has a ter­rif­ic grasp of per­spec­tive and fore­short­en­ing. Look­ing at those orig­i­nal X‑Men it’s hard not to feel that the pages are real­ly com­ing alive.

Dave Sim and Gerhard

My love for obses­sive­ly cross­hatched pen and ink work came direct­ly from Dave Sim or, more accu­rate­ly Ger­hard who did all of the back­grounds for Cere­bus start­ing with issue #66. Pri­or to this, I thought of black and white art­work as being art­work which had­n’t yet been col­ored, or which was not to be col­ored because col­or print­ing was too expen­sive. Ger­hard built lush tex­tures with one tool almost exclu­sive­ly: lines. Lots of lines. When you can cre­ate not just tones but sur­face qual­i­ties using only com­bi­na­tions of pure black and pure white, there’s some kind of mag­ic happening.

Vaughn and Mark Bodé

For a short while, I tried to copy Vaughn Bodé and his son Mark. My char­ac­ter Killer Nougie from the comics I put togeth­er in high school is a shame­less rip-off of Cobalt 60. The dif­fer­ence? Killer Nougie had a big nose. And wore a dou­ble-breast­ed trench­coat. Styl­is­ti­cal­ly the influ­ence did­n’t stick much, prob­a­bly because the sort of loose car­toon work both Bodés did required a lot more skill than I had. Okay, a lot more skill than I have.

Bill Sienkiewicz

Then Bill Sienkiewicz took every­thing good about Neal Adams and turned it on its head. Sienkiewicz’s work was the first illus­tra­tion that did­n’t just tempt me to copy, but to decon­struct and to stop tak­ing myself so damn lit­er­al­ly. His work intro­duced me to the con­cept of deren­der­ing, some­thing I’ve almost com­plete­ly for­got­ten about. Look­ing at Bill Sienkiewicz’s work at the end of the Moon Knight run was real­ly where I start­ed to under­stand that any­thing was pos­si­ble. Then he kept push­ing far­ther with his work on New Mutants and went on to ful­ly-paint­ed work in the Elek­tra: Assas­sin series and Stray Toast­ers. Some thought he went off the deep end, but it was because he was swim­ming in the ocean.

Steve Bissette and John Totleben

Steve Bis­sette and John Totleben were doing some­thing like what Sienkiewicz did, except com­ing from the Joe Kubert camp rather than the Neal Adams camp. These two opened my eyes to pos­si­bil­i­ties of page and frame lay­out that broke all the rules and still worked. The lines these two made were incred­i­bly expres­sive and illus­tra­tive at the same time. A few pen strokes and brush strokes and it’s all over. It’s the kind of work that is loose and ges­tur­al and spot-on exact at the same time. I still joke that some day I’ll grow up and become Stephen Bissette.

Michael Cherkas

Michael Cherkas’s The Silent Inva­sion opened my eyes to the val­ue of brush work. I tried doing a whole sto­ry only in brush (Rick Trig­ger: The Cop With His Mouth Full pub­lished in the back of The Saga of Elf Face. If you don’t already know, don’t ask. Real­ly.) and dis­cov­ered how dif­fi­cult it is. I still have nowhere near the facil­i­ty with a brush that I should have, but I owe what­ev­er chops I have to attempt­ing to copy Cherkas’s style from Silent Inva­sion.

I still sur­prise myself by how much I like Cherkas’s art­work. It’s not my nor­mal fine-line fig­u­ra­tive real­ist fare. But the appeal of Silent Inva­sion is much more than just the intrigu­ing plot. The flu­id geom­e­try of Cherkas’s fig­ures is engag­ing and delight­ful. His style is con­sis­tent and unique while most artists lose their style when they improve their con­sis­ten­cy. Cherkas’s brush­work cre­ates a voice than enrich­es and informs the plot of Silent Inva­sion as much as than the sto­ry informs the artwork.

Matt Howarth

How can I pos­si­bly say enough good things about Matt Howarth? I can’t. He proved that painstak­ing­ly beau­ti­ful tex­tur­al pen and ink ren­der­ing and a sim­pli­fied, car­toony style can live togeth­er on the same page and the same draw­ing with­out los­ing coher­ence. This is a guy who can real­ly car­toon and ren­der. If Stephen Bis­sette is who I want to be when I grow up, Matt Howarth is who I want to be after I achieve enlight­en­ment, take the Bod­hisatt­va vow, and return to Sam­sara until all beings can be enlight­ened. Or after I get shift­ed to Bug­town. If those aren’t the same thing.

Deal Whitley

It seems almost unfair to list him here because he was a men­tor to me and so his influ­ence was direct, but a list of my ear­ly influ­ences would not be com­plete with­out men­tion­ing Deal Whit­ley. Deal helped put it all togeth­er for me in ways none of the above could have. Deal showed me not just what oth­er peo­ple were doing right or wrong, but what I was doing that was right or wrong. He was always gen­er­ous with his time and his advice and he helped expand my illus­tra­tion and sto­ry­telling vocabularies.

This could not pos­si­bly be a com­plete list, and of course I’ve acquired inspi­ra­tion from many oth­ers since the peri­od of time I’m describ­ing. There are greats I’ve tried to learn from but did­n’t imi­tate as direct­ly, like Will Eis­ner, Frank Miller, Matt Wag­n­er, Jaime Her­nan­dez, Walt Simon­son, and many oth­ers. The four­teen artists list­ed above, though, rep­re­sent a fair­ly com­plete line-up of the dif­fer­ent direc­tions I’ve been pulled in as an artist, and not just as a com­ic artist or as an illus­tra­tor. It’s an exer­cise that shows me more about my his­to­ry than any­thing else, and writ­ing about each of these artists — even briefly as I have — shows how far I have yet to come.