February 2025: Influences

Four visual artists who had a major influence on me, plus Will Eisner.

Watching: Grosse Pointe Blank
Reading: Death Trip by Seth Lorinczi
Listening to: Bridges Squares by Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Klaus Nomi
Working on: art for a zine I wrote in TheEarthOf’s Lore workshop, twelve pages of a graphic novel pitch, totally changing my life

For a visual artist, I don’t have a lot of visual artist influences – there’s plenty of visual art and artists whose work I adore and admire, but few end up as DNA strands in my own work. It may have something to do with having complete aphantasia, I’m not picturing anything when I draw. There are a few though.

Quentin Blake was the first artist whose work I recognised as a child, and I liked it so much I found it hard to look at. I’d hunt for his books at the library and then almost be unable to open them, and would avoid the ones on my own bookshelf the way you avoid something you really want. I had to psych myself up, I was so overwhelmed by his artwork.

I was not an artist at this point. I made up stories.

In Australia in the 90s, American comics were very expensive. My parents did not buy me any (which would lead to me wanting more, endlessly), but they did buy me Tintin books. There was something about the pacing that made me forget I was reading, I remembered them as films. I’m not getting mixed up with the cartoon – that came later. The simple dot eyes were so expressive, and the way the characters moved was always just right, there was nothing clumsy, everything was distilled. The single line style, as I know it’s called now, was more beautiful to me than any complex renderings, and the hatching ubiquitous in 90s American comics seemed grotesque.

It still did not occur to me to draw, and never to draw comics. I wrote, my cousins drew.

Milt Kahl’s hand was all over the animated films of my childhood, his style was so distinct even when operating within the Disney house styles. You’d recognise him. These days, I can talk about economy of line, of gesture, about shapes and silhouettes and all that. Back then, I was transfixed by the hands, by the way a face would totally change when a line shifted. And weirdly, I kind of understood it. There was something subtle that I was beginning to notice.

It never occurred to me that you could learn to do this, and I knew I couldn’t draw because all the other kids could, or, at least they did. I didn’t.

I started drawing in my teens. At first it was infuriating; I knew what I wanted to express, but I couldn’t see anything in my head and had to just keep trying until it looked right. I wasn’t looking at visual art though, I was listening to music and seeing bands and watching live action films and reading books at a ferocious pace. I wanted to draw things that looked like how the music I was obsessed with sounded, and I was starting to see subtleties in film, in people. I wrote a lot. I thought about comics sometimes but I didn’t think I was a good enough artist to do one, and I had no clue where to start.

In my early teen years, I discovered Cab’s work, which was absurdly, almost embarrassingly, influential. This looked like what I wanted to do, this person understood: she observed, she appreciated the things no one else seemed to. The urban landscapes, the nods to music, the characters made by someone who understood subculture, not just someone who liked the trappings of it. The details mattered, there was mess and looseness, but simplicity. I didn’t want to copy her, but I did take liquid ink from my highschool storeroom to try dip pens.

I was surprised to discover that a few aspects of drawing came naturally to me. Others were hard, I was definitely no prodigy, but I remember one of the English teachers looking at a cartoon I’d drawn and saying “it’s funny, you’ve drawn someone alive, there’s almost no gap between him and a real person even though he’s not realistic at all.” One of my art teachers told me years later that I was always standing back a little, watching everyone and making mental notes. I wasn’t shy; she described me as a voyeur.

I wrote and drew my first comic in 2009, an eight-pager for Jeff McComsey’s first FUBAR book. I had no idea what I was doing. Later, I discovered storyboards and tried hand drawn animation. I wasn’t gifted, but I had an instinct for gesture and emotion. I got accepted to UCLA’s Animation Director graduate program and for some stupid, stupid reason, I didn’t go. I went to Academy of Art in San Francisco for a semester, they put me in third year classes and none of the teachers really talked to me – it was a pretty awful experience. I dropped out and worked as a 2D animator for a while, but kept coming back to comics because I could do them on my own. I love storyboards too.

Eventually, I read Will Eisner’s books about making comics. He was the only other person I’d ever come across who conceptualised pacing as music.