Influence Tree

 

The roots are deep in the 60s and 70s. You start with Frank Frazetta

And Richard Corben. 

Advance to the 80s and add in a cutting of Frank Miller.

Combine all these influences together and you get Simon Bisley. Ok, I'm actually not sure if Miller's Sin City came before or after—probably after. But I guarantee Miller's art was a strong influence. Actually when he did Sin City he was probably being influenced in turn by Bisley, These trees twist and turn sometimes. 

One key feature to pay attention to is the way they use blacks. They all do it extensively and powerfully. 

The one above is still by Bisley. 

This one is by Jae Lee in the 90s. A bit of influence maybe? 

More Jae Lee. Less strong of an influence (he practically cribbed the other image from Bisley), and there are a few other influences as well I can point out. One of the strongest being Bill Sienkiewicz. I don't want to litter this post up with too many influences, it's getting a bit complicated already. Scroll down a bit and I've got some images by Sieniewicz posted, along with a pronunciation guide for his name. 

And here we have Mark Texeira. Looking at these together like this, I can see he undoubtedly took some influence from Jae Lee. Or was it the other way around? They were working at the same time. The influence tree gets really tangled, doesn't it? But you can definitely feel the influence, even if you can't tell which way it went. Note the heavy use of spatter and scraping with a razor blade through black ink, or overpainting with white to create those really powerful expressionist shapes. Explosions of pure raw power. 

Actually some influence comes from the Warren horror comics of the 70's here too. I need to get some pics uploaded from those. During the period known as the Spanish Invasion, when Jim Warren hired a whole stable of Spanish artists to work from overseas, they did a lot of scraping with razor blades and spattering in their large format black-and-white horror comics, and Tex and Lee were definitely paying attention. Some of that influence moved through the 70's Batman art—it became very horror- and gothic-inspired for a while. 

I also detect a strong Aliens influence here. The guns look just like the ones the Colonial Marines used in Cameron's movie. Crazy, now we have influences coming in from the world of movies! I'm sure that happens all the time. Hah! Coming in to edit because I just saw the Terminator influence above. More than influence, it was a direct rendition of the character by Bisley. So I guess there's a Terminator influence in nthe Jae Lee Chapel image too, but more subtle, filtered through the Biz piece. Influences abouding, back and forth and every which way. 

Because I've been posting so much about all these artists recently I've begun to really notice these influences and cross-pollination of ideas and techniques. But something else is happening too. They're swirling through my head and merging together and taking root in my mind. This is exactly what happened one night back in the 90s when I decided to sit down and look through all my heroic fantasy art books. I made a pile of them on the bed, sat next to them, and paged through them all—mostly Frazetta and Corben and Jeffrey Jones. Probably Ken Kelly too. I went for at least an hour, probably closer to 2—until I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore. I moved all those books off the bed, crawled in, and when I closed my eys all I could see were swirling images of all those paintings. They coalesced and after a while I was seeing something a little different. A new image—not crisp and clear, a little blurry and ill-defined, no real detail, but sort of the idea of detail in places. It was this:

I actually saw it in color, like the painting, but before I could do the painting I had to do the sketch:

I don't remember if I drew it before going to sleep. More likely I lay in bed until I saw it, then got up and drew it. Screw sleep, when you have a momentous idea like this you need to get it down, written or sketched, before letting yourself drift off, or the next morning you'll be all like "Now what was that cool idea I had last night?" 

What was so powerful about this image is the convergence of the composition, the slightly comical aspect of the figure, but without sacrificing his heroic aspect, and the cool color palette. I saw all of that at once. It was my first experience with getting a mental image and knowing I needed to draw/paint it. The next time I remember that happening was here: 

• Developing the Body the Right Way part 2

I seem to have myself primed for another such experience. I'm getting pretty sleepy, maybe I need to look through a big pile of comic books before I drift off...