Influences, Part I

I think it'd be appropriate for my first few blog entries on my brand new website to go on a little bit about the sort of art that has influenced me and the art that continues to inspire me.  While I'd like to think my eye is fairly eclectic it honestly really isn't: I am a product of my time, born in the mid-80's with tastes shaped by a mini-boom in the American comic industry and the beginnings of a wave of Japanese media available in the US for the first time.

I'll start with Jim Lee and this got damn gatefold cover.

So we all know that Jim Lee is one of the most influential comic artists of the last few decades. When I first saw this cover at seven years old there was something undeniably exciting. His style is so distinctive that to me it became synonymous with the X-Men. 

Lee's depiction of Psylocke as a steel-gazed Amazon made her one of my favorite characters. 

Whilce Portacio was another artist that immediately caught my eye. This cover in particular, which is so bombastic and chaotic, feels exemplary of the early 90's.  It's a visual feast, and remains one of the images I continuously come back to. 

Up through that period, their cultivation of talent (and the fact that I loved the X-Men) made me firmly pro-Marvel. I followed a lot of them to Image Comics, where a lot of them continued to do great work (I still to this day am sometimes taken aback with nostalgia whenever I see a Lee or Portacio cover). 

So touching on the Japanese media that I did earlier, SNES-era RPG's were certainly taste-makers for many of my generation, exposing us to certain Japanese aesthetics for the first time (which carried with them their own influences, both foreign and domestic). Box art for games was certainly hit or miss, but the best of it both caught the eye and sent the imagination into a fit. The box of the masterpiece Secret of Mana certainly did that for me, with its lush, alien greenery and the scale of the characters that conveyed a true sense of hugeness. 

My generation was one of the first to gradually enjoy broader access to Japanese anime and manga, and it's hard to overstate just how damn exciting it was. Every so often, through little flashes on TV or in gaming magazines you'd catch a glimpse, all in hypercolor with dynamic lines. I was hooked, immediately intrigued, and in the early-to-late 90's, before I (and many) had ready access to the internet all we could do was troll specialty stores in the mall or dutifully scan TV listings.  
Obviously,  this is a huge point of discussion, and the influence too broad and all-encompassing to go into to any sort of detail without getting lost.  So we'll go through the key points here. 

I'm pretty sure the first US dub of Akira was the first anime movie I had ever seen, and it goes without seeing that it was incredible and so totally unlike any other animated film I had experienced prior. 
 

The cityscape of neo-Tokyo was breathtaking, cast in strange colors and lights and so dense. The futureurban claustrophobia combined with the nightmarish imagery of psychic terror was wonderful and immediately intriguing . 

Also in the early 90's, we got Ronin Warriors (the US dub of Yoroiden Samurai Troopers), whose formula of color-coded transforming superheroes was made palatable to me earlier by the influence of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Visually, though, Ronin Warriors was vehemently Japanese and that couldn't be undone by a shit dub.  Man, was it pretty, with the demonic Japanese castles against the Tokyo cityscapes and the unfurling scrolls of patterned cloth during their transformation sequences. 

In 1997,  USA network began airing the (in retrospect dreadful) Dic dub of the mega-popular Sailor Moon. The aforementioned Power Rangers and Ronin Warriors had prepared me for this, but I didn't know just HOW much it had prepared me. As soon as I saw the first episode I went fucking apeshit.  It combined much of what I already loved- color-coded superheroes, weird monsters, good action- with a whole cornucopia of girly, magical shit. I was enraptured. The show was fucking gorgeous. 

Sailor Moon is something that I always come back to when in need of inspiration. The colors, the impressionistic, etherial backdrops, the beautiful animation. It's lovely. 
 

Later that year in 1997, Mixxzine was first published and my world kind of exploded a bit. 

The initial lineup included the Sailor Moon manga, Magic Knight Rayearth and Parasyte; the others seemed to rotate, but its schedule and availability in my small southern New Mexican hometown was so erratic I didn't really keep track. All that mattered was the stunningly beautiful art, both in Takeuchi's Sailor Moon and Clamp's Rayearth. 
 

Art in shoujo (girls) comics is interesting, bringing with it a whole set of influences not typically found in fare targeted at boys/men. While I was unaware of it at the time, the breezy-but-clean style had all the hallmarks of art nouveau, which itself would later become a major source of inspiration. 

Manga fueled my drawing well into my adolescence, but through friends and teachers my eye opened up to a lot more. In the next entry, I'll go into the influence of the wonderful classmates and arts educators that helped me discover a lot more beautiful stuff. 

Ahoy!