BorderCrash

I live in a small house in Henderson, Nevada, where the sun shines 85% of the year.  It’s hot here, and if you leave anything thin and plastic in your car in the summertime, it’s going to melt.

I was born in Missouri, where rain, snow, humidity, and hail are all part of the yearly experience.  In between, I lived in Kansas, Tennessee, Washington State, Japan, California, Jamaica, and Las Vegas.  All those moves happened for different reasons, like family, money, curiosity, or growth.

I’ve been making a living at art since I was 18.  This webcomic is a labor of love.  It won’t make me money for a long time, and even then, it’s not likely to make much.  I don’t mind.  Comics are what I’ve always wanted to do.

Will Eisner is the best, my all-time favorite.  I picked up a used copy of The Spirit in a flea market in rural Missouri in the mid-nineties.  I remember having to decide what to spend my dollar on… The Spirit or a short-lived Image title called Troll.  Troll was made at the peak of the 90s comic boom.  It was my first time looking at Todd Mcfarlane-style art, and I thought it was the most detailed work I’d ever seen.  But The Spirit just looked more interesting somehow.

And it was.  I didn’t know Eisner was a master storyteller.  I just knew that each panel was expressive and full of life.  The carefully-composed black and white areas, the jarring linework whenever the Spirit got hit in the head, the 40’s style bombshells growing more man-crazy with each story… it was amazing.

I picked up a copy of Troll in my late twenties.  It was quite a letdown… not nearly the masterpiece I thought it was at 14.

Steve Rude is my next favorite artist… but only when he’s working with Mike Baron.  The perfectly-proportioned figures, dramatic shadows, and telling expressions work best when paired with writing that is impactful, creative, and succinct.  Unlike Eisner, I never tried much to draw like Rude.  Years of caricaturing have made me want to exaggerate and express, more than I want to draw everything perfectly.

My third favorite is possibly the best artist who ever worked in comics.  Wally Wood wasn’t much of a writer, and his legacy ended in tragedy, but nobody ever pencilled and inked like him.  He would compose whole forests of twisting trees and babbling streams, then populate them with monsters and heroes adventuring through shafts of light.  My first exposure to Wally Wood was in the Kansas City Library, in a big collection of classic comics.  One of his stories for early Mad Magazine, called Superduperman, was shoved in near the back.  It was written by Harvey Kurtzman and featured a larger-than-life Superman clone, a pathetic Clark Kent, and the best-looking Lois Lane impersonator of all time.  I was hooked immediately.

The style I’ve chosen for this webcomic was heavily influenced by Roy Crane.  His Wash Tubbs & Captain Easy and later Buz Sawyer appeared after Terry and the Pirates had firmly established adventure strips.  But nobody working in that particular type of semi-realism ever did it better.  Crane sent his heroes to deeply-researched exotic lands, and put them through trifling romances, fierce knife fights, starvation, hurricanes, society parties, bloody gun battles, and everything in between.  He’d take the time to draw detailed, wide panels that captured the mood of the location.  He worked heavily with gray tones and textures, always well-composed to draw the eye to his figures.  And he wrote in realistic dialogue, punctuated by breathless captions.  I want to be like him.

A knowledgeable reader will notice another influence- the Japanese.  After all, I lived there for a year, speak some of the language, and have read tons of manga.  So why aren’t any Japanese artists in my top four?

It’s because I like how the Japanese tell stories visually, but I usually don’t care for the kind of pacing or structure they use.  For example, I like it when they take the time to show you pieces of the scenery, but not when they’re leaving the narrative to do so.  I like the high drama and extremely exaggerated features, but not when the characters are arguing about what to have for dinner.  More often than not, if I’m reading or watching a Japanese cartoon, I’ll find myself caught up in the mood of a moment, appreciating all the detail they’ve taken the time to reveal… then I’ll be bored, when I realize that all this art doesn’t have much, if anything, to do with the story.

Here are some other big influencers, in no particular order:  Al Capp, Craig Thompson, Walt Kelly, E. C. Segar, Adrian Alphona, Windsor McCay, and Dave Sim.  I could write pages about each, and describe how they’ve impacted me.