I'm ancient. There were a number of comic creators who influenced me over the years. My earliest (at age 5) were the Max Fleischer animators of the 1930s Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons, the Warner Brothers cartoons Bugs Bunny, Terrytoon Studios' Mighty Mouse, and Wayne Boring who drew Superman, and Dick Sprang who drew Batman. The Harvey Comics with Hot Stuff the Little Devil, Casper the Friendly Ghost, and his pal Spooky.

I've been influenced by all sorts of stuff. As for comic influences, I say Disney comic artist Don Rosa was a big influence in my childhood. His style felt the most organic and visceral somehow which I really liked. I think Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird owe some credit as well, I was a huge TMNT fan as a child reading comics published by Archie.

Also hue credit to all the italian creators, writers and artists of Paperinik New Adventures, it was like a marriage between Disney and Marvel (And that was before the two actually did get married by the way^^). I also discovered Simon Bisley very early and fell in love with his artstyle, although I haven't actually read FAKK2 yet as someone who owns and occasionally read Heavy Metal comics.

Oh, and writer Juan Diaz Canales and artist Juanjo Guarnido who ceated the noir comic series Blacksad together. A huge noir influencer right there.

I'm fairly certain I touched on this in another thread or two, but it actually wasn't comic artists who influenced me so much as it was animators and other cartoonists who had the biggest influence on me, and that was mainly because I'm of the Cartoon Generation: when I was growing up, Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network were in their prime, and the shows they had to offer were game-changers for TV animation, so they were highly influential on a lot of us kids in the 90s.

Prominently, I would say Joe Murray (ROCKO'S MODERN LIFE) and David Feiss (COW AND CHICKEN) initially had the most influence on me as a kid, particular when it comes to designing and drawing off-beat cartoon animal characters, but I also really enjoyed how in Feiss's work, his backgrounds often had a unique rough/scratchy look to their line art, and a marbly kind of textured paint job that was unlike anything I had seen in TV cartoons before.

But it was John R. Dilworth (COURAGE THE COWARDLY DOG) and Danny Antonucci (ED, EDD N EDDY) who ended up having the most influence on my art style overall. With Dilworth, there's so much about his style that rubbed off on me over the years, and a lot of it little things like shading in small corners, placing shadows underneath characters, his use of lighting and textures to give backgrounds and scenes a touch of surreal photorealism, all of which I adopted into my own art style. With Antonucci, there was one very, very specific thing about his style that influenced me: you remember how all of the characters on ED, EDD N EDDY had different colored tongues? He said that was inspired by how kids would eat certain hard candies that would turn their tongues different colors. I remember as a kid noticing how most everyone on EEE had tongues that were different shades of blue or green, and thinking that if I was a character on EEE, just for something different, I'd want a purple tongue . . . and that is why to this day, all of my characters in my style, regardless if they're cartoons or puppets, have purple tongues.

Probably a lot of cartoons I saw on TV, Gargoyles being an obvious one.

Mike Wieringo's art was huge to me, though. I can't say it actually formed my style because I still don't have one and what I do have doesn't come close, but I would still sit for hours staring at his work and wishing so hard I could draw like him. It actually crushed me when he died.

Growing up in Brooklyn, NY in the 1950s I spent a lot of time on Sundays reading the comic sections of the NY Sunday News, the NY Sunday Mirror, and the Sunday Journal American. I was particularly attracted to the storytelling and visuals of Dick Tracy, Li'l Abner, The Phantom, and Popeye.

But it was Mort Walker's Beetle Bailey that influenced me about paring my dialog down to its absolute essential to get punch and snap! Over the years, I learned from having to storyboard many animation shows that animation/comic book writing is about pacing your story beats. If the audience gets bored they'll drop you before you get to the interesting parts of your story.

JohnCelestri wrote:

But it was Mort Walker's Beetle Bailey that influenced me about paring my dialog down to its absolute essential to get punch and snap! Over the years, I learned from having to storyboard many animation shows that animation/comic book writing is about pacing your story beats. If the audience gets bored they'll drop you before you get to the interesting parts of your story.

That's good advice

JohnCelestri wrote:

But it was Mort Walker's Beetle Bailey that influenced me about paring my dialog down to its absolute essential to get punch and snap! Over the years, I learned from having to storyboard many animation shows that animation/comic book writing is about pacing your story beats. If the audience gets bored they'll drop you before you get to the interesting parts of your story.

Very wise - I've tried to keep the wordiness down (and failed and succeeded at that, depending). I liked Beetle Bailey too.

I liked seeing a mention of Li'l Abner, too - I'm not sure how I learned about Li'l Abner but it was probably in a comics magazine article somewhere (similar to how I learned about “The Spirit”).

Anyway, I enjoy Li'l Abner and it's mostly forgotten these days!

My influences/loves were plenty of Saturday morning cartoons like SuperFriends and Dungeons & Dragons, and comics artists, particularly Harry Lucey and Dan Decarlo of Archie fame, and John Byrne, Jack Kirby and various Marvel artists in the 80's. I guess 90's independent movies were the vibe that eventually led me to make my own webcomics at last…

Someone from Poland here who was a kid when Iron Curtain went down, so in my case bunch of local comic and cartoon creators nobody will recognize. Also some stuff we imported from Japan. I'm talking 70s anime here.
A lot when it comes to sense of humor I got from local gaming magazines. Things that would be absolutely unacceptable today (and got me banned in few places online already), but then nobody cared about being politically correct. Plus those magazines were places where all kind of comic strips were also published.
But the biggest influence came from illustrations in older RPG books. Very, veeery niche hobby back then, so no big money was involved and everything except cover was black and white illustrations made with pen and ink. I always liked the idea of making drawings that way.

Finally someone asks me.
easy;
ALAN MOORE

Terry Pratchet and One

I don't think anyone my age who had access to a newspaper as a kid can't name Calvin and Hobbes as an influence at some level. Art-wise, Ben Caldwell is the first artist who ever helped me really “get” drawing, and I took some inspiration from Sky Doll (Alessandro Barbucci and Barbara Canepa), as well. I think my preference for female protagonists is mostly from classic anime like Project A-Ko, Slayers, and Sailor Moon.

I like a lot of creators but the one I've tried to imitate the most unsuccessfully is john byrne.

but yea i love neal adams, simonson,mazzuchelli, romita sr and jr, kirby, buscema too many to name

I won't try and make a complete list, and I won't try and rank them, but I can dimly remember the rough order in which I got to know my major influences.

- Don Rosa and Carl Barks. I've never been too fond of Disney, but for a long time it was almost all the comics I could get my hands on, and what those two did with the Duck family were works of art in every panel. It was often mixed with Mickey Mouse comics, which I could never really warm to for some reason. It's probably because they tended to be preachier; I'm referring to the European market, of course, with all the output by the Italian artists (who often did a great job, too, but tended to Flanderize the characters.)
I have to say that the way I draw our Drunk Duck in awards presentation owes a lot to their version of Donald. It happens instinctively, can't help it. My own stuff is influenced by them, too, but not as obviously.

- Belgian and French artists: mainly Franquin (Spirou, Marsupilami, and especially Gaston), Uderzo (Asterix), Morris (Lucky Luke) and Peyo (the Smurfs) - in that order. Later also Hergé (Tintin). All of them had, to varying degrees, a certain cool way of seamlessly mixing realism with cartoons and could get quite gritty for all-ages comics when the situation called for it. I could add lots of names to this list, whose works I encountered later.

- Don Martin: I was still at a tender age when I found a folder of cutouts from old Mad Magazines and was instantly hooked by the sheer lunacy going on at a breakneck pace all over the pages. Sergio Aragones was in there, too. If it wasn't for my bilingual background, I'd have missed out on that.

- Brösel: I guess nobody knows him and his Werner comics outside of Northern Germany, which is a pity. He took real life, combined it with his own shenanigans and drew it in a very cool, fun and unique, cartoony way. Starting with self-publishing it in the 80s, the early stuff was comparable to earlier underground comics, only funnier.

- Drunk Duckers of the mid-2000s; seeing what I'd missed out on before kind of triggered me to start posting stuff of my own. Today's Duck is a major reason why I know I'm going to do so again. Btw. I recently sorted out some of the things that kept me from it, even if not all of them.

As a child: Richard Corben, Vaughn Bode, Larry Todd.

As a teenager: Moebius, Phillippe Druillet, Gaetano Liberatore.

As an adult, most of my influences come from painters, as opposed to comic book artists. An extremely abridged list of these would include John Singer Sargent, Egon Schiele, and Eugene Delacroix

PaulEberhardt wrote:


- Brösel: I guess nobody knows him and his Werner comics outside of Northern Germany, which is a pity. He took real life, combined it with his own shenanigans and drew it in a very cool, fun and unique, cartoony way. Starting with self-publishing it in the 80s, the early stuff was comparable to earlier underground comics, only funnier.

I loved reading “Werner!” I especially loved how all the dialogue was written in a northern dialect

JohnCelestri wrote:
I'm ancient. There were a number of comic creators who influenced me over the years. My earliest (at age 5) were the Max Fleischer animators of the 1930s Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons, the Warner Brothers cartoons Bugs Bunny, Terrytoon Studios' Mighty Mouse, and Wayne Boring who drew Superman, and Dick Sprang who drew Batman. The Harvey Comics with Hot Stuff the Little Devil, Casper the Friendly Ghost, and his pal Spooky.

I was exposed to all of those growing up but honestly the one that made me pick up a pencil was probably Jim Davis with Garfield.