Developing a drawing style

My friend, Scott Christian Sava, once said that his art was a mosaic of all of the artists who inspired him.

That video really resonates with me. Like nearly everyone who picked up How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way, I was obsessed with drawing like “Big” John Buscema. I got the book in ’77, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

It always kinda breaks my heart a little when I read about how he didn’t really enjoy drawing superhero comics that much. His real love was in Conan — and it showed.

While I was struggling to achieve the mastery of human anatomy that Buscema exhibited, I was equally drawn to this guy’s work.

Berke Breathed’s Bloom County was everything I was looking for in a newspaper comic strip. Razer-sharp satire and a drawing style that jumped off the page at me. Besides… I wasn’t getting any better at reaching Buscema’s art, but Breathed? That seemed attainable to a pre-teen Guigar. The 1980s were dominated by him, Gary Larson and Bill Watterson. It was a wonderful time to be a comic-strip fan. Plenty of inspiration to go around.

Around the same time, I discovered Pat Oliphant. All of the biting wit of Breathed, with lineart that made my jaw drop every time it appeared on my newspaper’s editorial page.

And, of course, the eighties meant that any self-respecting comic book fan was scrambling to get everything with this guy’s name on it.

…and that was a lot. While John Byrne was writing, penciling, and inking Marvel’s signature series, The Fantastic Four, he launched the sublime Alpha Flight. His art was gorgeous in its efficiency and imagination. His character design for the Thing remains the gold standard for me.

My Mosaic

I tried to copy them all — plus a bunch I discovered along the way. Wood, Cole, Sneyd, Kelly, Horikoshi, the list goes on. (And it grows a little longer every year.) Hell, I even learned to appreciate Jack Kirby, thanks to night of impassioned advocacy by Chris Giarrusso. And a few whiskey sours. In the end, did I capture any of them?

Nah. Not really. And maybe it’s better that way.

I became me. And I’m still becoming who I’m gonna be. But every now and then, I’ll see an attempt at an Oliphant line or a Breathed-esque character design, and I’ll smile.

It’s like a visit from an old friend.